


Programs And Users Have A Common Descent

by Omorka



Category: Eureka, Tron (Movies)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-13
Updated: 2011-08-13
Packaged: 2017-10-22 14:00:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omorka/pseuds/Omorka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam's getting mysterious messages from a trickster in the ENCOM system, messages that neither her nor Alan can trace.  To save a contract for the Department of Defense, they reluctantly accept help from two of the few hackers better than they are - Douglas Fargo and Zane Donovan.  But their new enemy is up to some thirty-year-old tricks . . .</p>
            </blockquote>





	Programs And Users Have A Common Descent

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't a shippy fic, but just in case anyone has really severe ship squicks: references Zane/Jo and Alan/Lora, implies Sam/Quorra, possibly vaguely implies past Alan/Flynn or Alan/Lora/Flynn if you squint really hard. One line stolen from _Independence Day_ ; title is a ripoff of a line from Hesiod's _Works And Days_. Art by the wonderful and talented LadyTalon (thanks so much)!

[   
](http://s74.photobucket.com/albums/i241/Ladytalon1/art/?action=view&current=6c021c16.png)

 

Sam surveyed the corridor stretching into the distance as the elevator closed behind him. The color scheme was subdued - grey and blue, with occasional touches of brushed steel, all faintly industrial-looking on an executive floor. Still, it was better than those corporations with carved teak and leather all over the Board of Directors’ level.

“This way,” said the nameless executive assistant who’d brought him up here. Sam sighed, and followed; he wished, not for the first time, that Alan could have been here, but he’d been juggling investors since 6 that morning, and Sam had sent him home exhausted after twelve hours. The door he was led through looked more or less like all the others.

The room behind it didn’t. A vast expanse of glass behind the desk looked out on the streetlights below; the flat, shining surface of the glass mirrored the night sky above. A single leather chair - ah, there was the executive leather - waited behind the exact geometric center of the desk, not so much beckoning as biding its time.

“Will it do, Mr. Flynn?” asked the flunky.

Sam ran one hand across his face. “Yeah, I guess. What’s your name?”

“You can call me Justin, sir.”

“Only if you’re going to call me Sam,” he blurted before he caught himself.

Fortunately, the assistant was only startled for a second - maybe his reputation would cushion his lack of tact. “If that’s what you want, sir.”

Sam edged behind the desk towards the chair. The view out the window was completely uninterrupted; good thing he wasn’t scared of heights. “Actually, I’d rather have your last name.”

“Ah. Dickerson, sir.”

“Well, Mr. Dickerson, I’m going to need either a top-of-the-line desktop or a wireless connection for a laptop in here -”

The assistant smiled. “You have the best desktop ENCOM can buy.”

Sam glanced around; the desk was clean. “Where?”

“In the desktop.” Dickerson’s grin turned up at one corner. “I’ll be in the reception area if you need me, Mr. Flynn.” He pointed at the left corner of the desk. “The blue button activates the intercom.”

Sam leaned over as his executive assistant left. “So what does the red button do?” he muttered, pushing it.  
Immediately the glass desktop lit up, displaying ENCOM’s latest operating system in all its multitasking glory. Sam chuckled at himself - of course; the company had been using horizontal touchscreen interfaces since long before they went mainstream. He tapped the surface just below the virtual screen, and a keyboard appeared beneath his fingertips.

He’d been configuring his browser for twenty minutes when a single, blinking cursor appeared in the space between keyboard and screen. It took him most of a second to notice it. “A command line?” he wondered out loud, as he swiped one finger along it. Nothing happened. When he typed, no text appeared on it.

It blinked for the better part of another five minutes before the cursor moved. In all caps, one line of white text appeared beneath the black glass:

> IT’S GOOD TO HAVE YOU BACK, FLYNN.

“Justin?” Sam asked, forgetting himself.

> NO, FLYNN. I’VE WORKED HERE FAR LONGER THAN MR. DICKERSON.

Only one line of text appeared at a time; when the next one started, the previous one disappeared. For a fleeting instant, Sam wondered if he could lift the glass cover to see the display directly. That probably wouldn’t tell him anything. “There’s voice recognition software in this thing,” he realized out loud.

> YES. I LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING YOUR THOUGHTS.

“I’ll just bet you do,” Sam muttered. “Care to tell me to whom I’m speaking?”

The cursor blinked for a long moment, then displayed:

> ANOTHER GRAIN OF SAND IN ENCOM’S GEARS.

“Oh, _really_.” Sam leaned back against the black leather. “And what sort of prankster are you?”

But the cursor only displayed:

> GOOD NIGHT, FLYNN.

It blinked five times, then disappeared, along with the last line of text. Sam drummed his fingers against the glass once, oblivious to the smudges he left. Finally, he began feeling underneath the edge of the glass for the screws that held it down.

\---

“Alan?” Sam asked, slightly out of breath. “Whose office did they put me in?”

Alan paused in his stride down the corridor. “Well, it used to be Cartigan’s office before we threw him off the Board.”

Sam thought for a minute, then shook his head. “Don’t think this was him; he couldn’t program his way out of a bad subroutine. Who else?”

Alan glanced towards the meeting room. “Boorsine’s. Kerrigan’s. Mine, for a while.”

Sam swallowed. “Dad’s, before that?”

Carefully, Alan nodded. “Yeah.”

“Did he have the voice-recognition package installed in the desk?” Sam asked.

Alan paused again, working his jaw slightly. “It was installed before it was his office, but he used it, yeah. Can we have this discussion after we’ve convinced the South Korean investors that you’re not too big a destabilizing influence on the company?”

“But after Korea, we have the Defense Department meeting,” Sam griped. He started walking again, but his feet felt heavy. “And then the one with that little Canadian game company we bought six months ago - against my vote, even. We’re in meetings all morning.” His fingers found the knot of his tie and tugged at it lightly - he hated wearing these things.

“I know,” Alan said sympathetically, “but at least we don’t have a lunch meeting today. We can talk then. I know there are some big shoes to fill up there.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the problem.” Sam’s hand fell to the door handle. “I think I may have found more old code of Dad’s. And I think it may think I’m him.”

“You certainly sound just like him,” Alan replied, a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. “Talking like code can think. The voice recognition had to be reset for you, though; your pitches are different.”

“Okay,” Sam said, “we’ll talk about it later. But promise me you won’t brush me off like you did about the arcade.”

“I didn’t brush you off.” Alan’s eyes darkened. “I just think we should be very careful who hears us discussing that. Especially about Quorra.”

“Fair enough.” Sam tugged the door open and pasted on his best polite smile. “Hey, guys! Oh, hey, the translator beat us here, good. Everyone comfortable?”

The presentation went well enough, from what he could tell; at least, the investors nodded and laughed in the right places. Alan did most of the talking, which suited Sam just fine; he didn’t have a lot of expertise at this, and how profoundly bored he was might have been obvious. Presentation slideshows always put him to sleep.

He was starting to daydream about the next modifications to his motorcycle when he noticed the tiny cursor blinking in the corner of the projection screen, outside the field of the slide and just below the ENCOM logo. He tried to catch Alan’s eye unobtrusively; it took him a couple of tries. Alan glanced at it, shrugged, and kept on going.

> DON’T YOU HAVE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO, FLYNN?

The words were too small for the investors to read from their seats; at least, Sam was pretty sure they were. He hoped to blazes they were. When Alan turned around to change slides, they faded, but Sam saw his eyes catch the last word and flash.

The same thing happened during the Department of Defense presentation, but not on the same slide, and was followed by:

> YOU CAN’T STAY AWAY FOREVER, YOU KNOW.

The same two messages appeared _again_ during the Candians’ meeting, again on two different slides. By the time they shook hands and shut down the laptop, even Alan seemed a little flustered.

\---

“I’ve checked the routers twice,” Alan huffed. The presentation laptop sprawled open on the table between them, half-eaten salad plates wallowing forgotten on either side. “No external signals sent to the wireless modem. All it received were the standard pings from the main server.”

Sam drummed his fingers on the table and wished the napkins were paper; he needed something to sketch on. “So, could someone piggyback a signal on an are-you-still-there packet?”

“No,” Alan stated flatly. “They don’t carry external information. They’re generated by the system itself.”

The idea beginning to percolate through Sam’s consciousness was uncomfortable enough to ignore for the moment. “Could someone plant the messages in the system to be delivered later?”

“I don’t think so.” Alan jabbed at the touchpad and shut the laptop down. “At least, not without getting through more layers of security than either of us ever been able to hack through.”

“Or the ‘Flynn Lives’ guys.” Sam watched his mentor flip the computer over and remove the battery cover. “So you think the messages were planted on your machine before the conference?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. But I can’t find them in the presentation software, and I wrote half the damn thing,” Alan answered as he pried out the battery and peered into its slot. “Or any of the other software. The OS is clean; I compared it against the quasi-open-source version you released to the wild. There’s nothing in the word processor, and I don’t keep personal files on this laptop.” He sighed and slid the battery back into position. “I’m going to have to take the cover off.”

“Not with all these breadcrumbs around.” Sam glanced across the restaurant; none of the tables near them were clean, either. “I think that’s our soup coming, and unless you brought a screwdriver, all I have is the multitool.” He paused. “Um, there’s no way the voice-recognition system in my desk could have copied itself into the laptop, is there?”

“What?” Alan shook his head again. “No, it’s specific to that particular desk; it’s actually hard-coded into the ROMs.” He paused, studying Sam’s face. “Let’s go ahead and eat. Unless you grabbed something from the vending machines, I’m guessing you didn’t have dinner last night.”

Sam gave him a wry grin. “Still looking out for me? Here I was hoping our roles would change once I was technically your boss.”

“You’ve technically been my boss since you turned 18, or at least one of my bosses.” Alan closed the laptop and slid it under his chair as the soup arrived. “You’ve just never called me into the office before, so to speak.”

“So no letting up on the surrogate dad thing?” Sam twirled the soup spoon in his fingers. “Man, I’m just not having any luck.”

Alan shrugged. “Given that you seem to have a cyberstalker who’s better than we are, I think I feel a little bit protective, yeah.” He sipped at the cream of tomato. “I can’t imagine that’ll really hurt your feelings.”

“No, not really.” Sam took a spoonful of the minestrone and vaguely regretted ordering it; a problem to work on put him in the mood for something fresher. “But if this guy’s really better than we are, who can we get to catch him? That Dillinger kid?”

“No.” Alan flinched slightly. “Did I mention that was his dad’s office before it was Kevin’s?”

“You think maybe he’s behind this?”

“I don’t think he’s that good,” Alan conceded, “but if anyone would have a motive, it’d be him.”  
Sam scowled. “Well, who’s better than he is?”

\---

Fargo tried not to look panicked as he activated the vidscreen on the desk phone. “Yes, General?”

General Mansfield looked serious, but not angry. That was an improvement over their last three conversations. “Doctor Fargo,” he started, at least trying to sound formal, “a corporate contractor for the DoD has an issue I think Global Dynamics might be able to help with.”

“Uh, General, that’s not normally the way this works, is it?” Fargo leaned on the arm of his desk chair, suppressing the urge to fidget. “I mean, typically Global works with government and quasi-governmental organizations only. Bringing in the Fixer was a special case.”

Mansfield’s image on the screen blinked once. “I agree it’s a little unusual,” he said slowly. “But they’re working on highly important equipment, and they seem to be having a security problem of a personal nature.”

Fargo pursed his lips; this was sounding more and more like something way below Mansfield’s purview. “I’m not following.”

The general sighed. “Okay, here’s the issue. Are you aware of the sudden turnover at ENCOM?”

“Oh, sure,” Fargo nodded. “About time, too, if you ask me. The MBAs in the upper levels were completely divorced from both the hardware and the software ends of the product line. I could have bummed out about two hundred thousand lines of code from their last release and -”

“I’m sure you could,” Mansfield interrupted. “But that’s irrelevant to why the turnover occurred. Were you old enough to remember when Kevin Flynn disappeared?”

“Just barely,” Fargo admitted. “But I know the story; he’s a hacker legend.”

“We have reason to believe that he was working on a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, but along completely different lines from B.R.A.D.” Mansfield allowed himself a tiny smirk as Fargo straightened up. “One that drew on emergent properties of the code.”

“You mean - artificial neural evolution?” Fargo’s voice took on a tremor of awe.

“I’m not sure. It was too technical for me, even at the time. However,” the general continued, “we have it on good authority that Sam’s sudden exertion of his long-unused powers as majority stockholder came immediately after he experimented with some of his father’s old equipment. How he gained access to it, we’re not sure - never could get the NSA guys to take old Flynn seriously.”

“So you think he found something?” Fargo was getting excited. “I mean, if there are multiple possible models for Turing-capable AI’s, we could combine methods and possibly end up with -” he caught himself as the general’s eyes widened - “applications for a commercial level we haven’t even imagined yet,” he finished, sounding awkward even to his own ears.

“Or a military one?” Mansfield watched Fargo nod silently. “I figured as much. Sam Flynn’s also popped up with an undocumented immigrant whom he’s trying to legalize. We’re not sure if she’s also a programmer, but she’s too young to have been a collaborator of his father’s.”

Fargo’s eyes were still ablaze with the AI possibilities. “Maybe she’s a student of one of his collaborators?”

“That’s possible,” Mansfield agreed.

“Where’s she from?”

“That’s just it - we don’t know. She’s completely undocumented, as far as we can tell - no records in any country that we have access to. We don’t even have a name.” Mansfield leaned back in his own chair. “We just had a meeting this morning with young Flynn and Bradley, the old lion who’s leading the charge to ‘take back’ the company, to talk about some of our satellite data-processing software, the stuff that’s too mundane to farm out to you guys. The meeting covered the usual stuff, making sure they’ll make good on all their old contracts, that they’re stable enough to make delivery dates, all that.” He rubbed one temple. “The top brass wanted me in on the meeting because they figured I’m used to dealing with engineers and idealists.”

Fargo suppressed a giggle. “I can see them wanting your expertise there, yeah.”

The general’s eyes darted to one side, then back to the camera. “At any rate, during the presentation, someone sent a couple of messages to the screen, suggesting that Flynn needed to be elsewhere. I’m sending you an image file of the second one - I wasn’t fast enough with the concealed camera to get the first one.”

Fargo turned to his computer and opened the new e-mail. A frown creased one brow. “That’s . . . you shouldn’t be able to do that.”

“I figured that much,” Mansfield grumbled. “How difficult is it?”

“Did it appear all at once, like an extra image in the slide, or one letter at a time, as if someone was typing?”

“One at a time, but very fast - your typing speed, not mine.”

Fargo’s eyes glanced up and darted as he calculated. “It’d take me at least two days to figure out how to hack that. Zane might be faster; it’s more his sort of gag.”

“Do you think it could be Donovan?”

Fargo bit his lower lip, thinking. “Not according to the time-stamp on the photo; he was in the high-energy particle lab then.” It was true; Zane had been trying to re-focus the boson collider to turn lead nuclei into gold nuclei, just because. At least it hadn’t been destructive.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive,” Fargo nodded, feeling relief flush over him. “I was there at the time.” He didn’t mention that he’d been trying to talk Zane into working instead of fooling around.

“Okay.” Mansfield leaned forward again; the braid on his shoulders swayed. “So then, I want to send you and Donovan up to ENCOM to fix their little hacker problem for them. And while you’re up there, I want you to find out everything you can about Flynn’s AI experiment, and whether the kid’s up to his old man’s tricks or it’s just him deciding to man up.”

“Me and Zane?” Fargo swallowed. “Um, I’m not sure I can keep a lid on him myself.”

“Tell him I’ll take a few marks off his record if he keeps his nose clean, and turn him over to Jo if he refuses to go, or goofs around.” Mansfield shrugged. “I know it was your predecessor who decided to hire him, and Thorne who took a shine to him - for whatever reason - but he’s your asset to deal with now, Fargo. I expect you to _make_ him an asset instead of a liability.”

“I’ll do what I can.” Fargo licked one corner of his mouth in a combination of eagerness and anxiety. “Uh, when are ENCOM expecting us?”

“They’re not, yet.” Mansfield held up one finger. “Leave that to me. I’ll send you the travel details as soon as I’ve got them.”

“What if they don’t -” Fargo started, but he was suddenly talking to a blank screen.

\---

ENCOM’s server farm took up most of a floor, and always had. Even back in the garage it had started in, most of the floorspace had been taken up by their first hand-built mainframe. One of Sam’s earliest memories was of sitting on Dr. Gibbs’s knee, listening to him reminisce about those early days.

Any single stack of the hundreds arrayed in front of him had roughly a million to a billion times the processing power of that ancient mainframe. So did both of the devices he was holding, for that matter. Their trickster, on the other hand, was deliberately communicating in ways that would have seemed right at home on a glass tty. Sam thumbed the screen on the phone in his left hand, making sure the app he and Alan had cooked up was ready to go.

A new window popped up on the laptop screen, black with a single blinking white cursor. “Okay, here we go,” Sam whispered to no one in particular, and started the app running. A thicket of flickering red dots appeared on the phone’s face, one for each of the servers in the vast farm in front of him.

> FLYNN, YOU AND I NEED TO TALK.

Sam made sure the microphone icon on the laptop was on. “Sure, ol’ buddy, what do we need to talk about?” he said, keeping his voice deliberately level.

> THERE ARE CHANGES IN ENCOM THAT NEED TO BE MADE.

“I’m working on it as fast as I can.” A cluster of red dots on the phone had lit brighter when the words appeared, but they quickly faded. Sam began walking in that direction, balancing the laptop in the crook of his right elbow and holding the phone out in front of him like some sci-fi sensor. Well, that was more or less what it was, at least at the moment.

> YOU NEED TO TERMINATE THE DEFENSE CONTRACTS.

Half the number of dots this time. Sam blinked, and slowed down. “Why would we want to do that? The government pays good money.”

> WE GOT TANGLED IN MILITARY AFFAIRS BEFORE. IT WAS ALMOST DISASTROUS.

The glow came from a different group of dots this time, but still in the same general direction. Sam edged over an aisle and wondered when the last time the carpet had been replaced was; it was showing distinct signs of wear. “When was this?” he asked, hoping his voice was louder than his footsteps. Thicker carpet would have been nice.

> AROUND YOUR FATHER’S TIME. MORE TO THE POINT, BETWEEN YOUR FATHER’S TIMES.

“When that Dillinger guy was in charge?” Another burst of red light, this time slightly farther away on the same aisle.

> YES.

“Does this have anything to do with his kid?” Roughly the same area this time; Sam was almost there.

> NOT AS FAR AS I KNOW.

Sam grinned; at last, an admission of ignorance on the prankster’s part. “Then who’s up to things?”

> I FEAR I AM. OR WILL BE.

Suddenly, a hurricane of dots swarmed the phone’s screen; Sam ‘s ears pricked up as every case fan in the room began to whir. “Hey, buddy, what’s happening?”

> HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?

“A what?” Sam looked up; the lights on the servers flickered like embers in a high wind. Suddenly, the room felt much warmer.

> WE WILL SPEAK AGAIN SOON. END OF LINE.

“Hey, don’t go away mad!” Sam expanded the window on the phone. For an instant, the entire room glowed under his fingers - then faded back to the initial dull red. Sam exhaled sharply, hoping that at least the recording function on the app had worked.

When the phone rang, he nearly dropped it; fortunately, his reflexes were faster than he was. “Hey, Alan, glad to hear from you. I think we -”

“Sam, get up to my office ASAP. We have a conference call from the Pentagon,” Alan interrupted.

“Be right up.” Sam dropped the phone into his pocket and snapped the laptop shut. “Is it just me, or is this getting a little too spy-thriller?”

\---

“Okay, guys, I need to make sure everyone has this all straight.” Fargo gestured impatiently as Larry propped a foam-core posterboard on the easel; his voice echoed annoyingly off the glass wall of his office.. “Henry, you’re officially the interim head of Global until I get back; if anything needs to happen, you’re in charge.”

“It’s okay, Fargo,” Henry assured him, smiling easily. “I’ve done this job before.”

 _And probably better than I am,_ Fargo thought; he was sure he saw the same thought on half of the small crowd around him. He cleared his throat. “Okay, Jo, for security issues, contact Henry first, and follow his decisions as if they were mine.”

“Will do, sir,” she said, nodding more at Henry than at him.

“If you have a major issue,” he continued, “call Sheriff Carter or Deputy Andy right after Henry, get them on the case, and then call me once you have everyone you need working.”

Jo gave him a small, tight smile. “It’s _okay_ , Fargo,” she stated flatly. “I’ve been doing this job long enough to handle a crisis.”

Fargo let his boss facade fall. “I know,” he admitted, “but I need to be able to tell Mansfield I have a complete plan in place just in case anything _does_ happen.”

Henry settled a reassuring hand on Fargo’s shoulder. “Fargo, something _will_ happen. This is Eureka. There’s no amount of planning in the world that will keep something unexpected from coming up while you’re away.”

“It’ll be the same something that would have come up while you were here,” Zane added, smirking in Larry’s direction. Larry scowled and scooted behind the poster of the organizational chart.

Henry ignored the interruption. “But the odds are pretty good that it’ll just be the usual sorts of stuff - the solvent intended to etch titanium will end up dissolving glass instead, or Seth will come up with a new strain of hallucinogenic mushroom, or the teenagers will invent long-distance spray-paint bombs. We’ve all handled these sorts of emergencies. For Eureka, they barely qualify.”

Carter, who had been observing the meeting with folded arms and the occasional eye-roll, nodded. “It’ll be a normal Thursday, is what Henry’s saying. Nothing we’re not trained to handle.”

Fargo pinched the bridge of his nose, then pushed his glasses back up. “Yeah, I know.” He sighed. “But if something big does happen, like the steel-eating bacteria again, then I have to have my ass covered for Mansfield, or I’m up Kelvin Creek without an icebreaker.”

“And I’ll take the fall if that does happen,” Henry finished. “It’s not as if Mansfield can fire me as interim head.”

“And in the highly unlikely event that he does,” Allison chimed in, “I’m right here and I can step in.”

Fargo nodded, defeated. “Yeah, yeah, okay. You don’t need me. I get it.”

“Can you stay off your wounded-ego trip for, like, half a second?” Zane grumbled.

“I could step in,” Larry offered, raising his hand like a schoolboy waiting to be called on.

“It’s not about not needing you, Fargo,” Allison assured him. “It’s about being able to function no matter who’s taken out of commission.”

“Which is a pretty important skill around here,” Carter observed. Jo blanched slightly; Carter flicked his gaze toward her and shook his head, mouthing _Not aimed at you_.

Fargo turned back to the org chart, tracing a pair of dotted lines from the boxes with his and Zane’s names back to Henry’s. “Anyway, the other thing I need to make sure everyone understands is what to do if something happens on _our_ end.”

“It’s a tiger-team network security job,” Zane pointed out. “What could happen that would be that bad?”

“Foreign spies,” Jo offered without a skipped beat. She sounded like she’d been thinking about it for a while; her eyebrows crinkled in suppressed worry.

“Spies, Lupo? Really?” Zane managed to stop himself from sneering, but his voice still dripped sarcasm.

“I was thinking something more like corporate espionage,” Carter filled in. “And let me tell you, those guys can be more dangerous. They don’t have to worry about maintaining deep cover, so they take a lot more risks.”

Zane started to lip off again, then stared at Jack, remembering how much of Carter’s experience was out in the mundane world. “You’re serious?”

“More importantly, they are. And while they’re not always armed, they can be pretty desperate,” Carter finished.

“So anyway,” Fargo broke in, “I’ve rigged some deadfall code for both of us.”

Henry raised an eyebrow. “As in, the Global network will stop working if you fail to check in on schedule?”

“Not quite.” Fargo raised his phone. “These are set to ping S.A.R.A.H. once every hour, and to transmit an info packet every four hours with the state of Zane’s and my heart-rates and blood pressures, as long as they’re on us. We’ll sleep with them on.”

“And when were you going to tell me about this?” Zane sighed.

“During this meeting. That’s why you’re here.” Fargo glared at him. “And it’s already taken five minutes longer than I’d originally scheduled -”

“Six,” Larry interjected.

“- Six minutes longer than I’d scheduled because everyone keeps interrupting me!” Fargo’s nostrils flared as he heaved a deep breath. “So can I go on now?”

Jo and Henry exchanged a concerned glance. “Sure,” they said quietly in unison.

Fargo took another breath to collect himself. “So if S.A.R.A.H. determines from the ping that we’re in distress, she’ll call us automatically. If both of us fail to pick up or text her back within five minutes, she’ll contact you guys, in the preferred order: Lupo, Deacon, Carter, Blake, Haberman. If she fails to receive a ping from one of the two phones, she’ll attempt to contact the other one immediately. If she doesn’t get an answer, or if she fails to receive a ping from both phones, she will go down the contact list and then attempt to enter the ENCOM system herself.”

“Is that a good idea?” Carter asked. “I mean, it’s - illegal, right?”

“Technically,” Fargo said very carefully, “I listed her on the manifest of software tools we might need to use on this job, so we should be covered.”

Henry managed to grin and frown at the same time. “But the manifest doesn’t mention she’s a fully functional Turing-capable AI.”

“Well, no,” Fargo protested, trying to look innocent. “That would be breaking confidentiality on a Global Dynamics Section Three experiment in progress.”

Zane failed to completely muffle his snort of laughter; Larry was only slightly more successful. Even Jo grinned behind one hand.

Carter pressed both lips together tightly. “Well, if you’re legally covered, I guess I can’t complain as long as it doesn’t make dinner late.”

“It shouldn’t,” Fargo assured him. “The cooking subroutines are almost completely independent of the security subroutines.”

“And if both phones are destroyed, you’ll probably be late to dinner anyway,” Henry pointed out. He turned back to Fargo. “Not that I think that’s likely to happen. Are you sure you’re not just being paranoid?”

“No, he’s being paranoid,” Allison broke in. “But given some of the things that have happened, I think we can all be forgiven a few irrational impulses.”

Fargo glanced down at his notepad. “Anyone have any questions that don’t involve discussing my neuroses?”

Larry raised his hand again. “Can I sit in your executive chair while you’re out?”

“No.” Fargo turned around. “Any _other_ questions?”

Jo stepped aside from the others as Zane started to drift off. “You - you’re going to follow Fargo’s instructions on this little caper,” she stated. “Got it?”

“I got it, Lupo,” he muttered. Slowly, he looked up and caught her gaze. “Look, it’s a computer security gig. I got this. Nothing heavy is going to go down, and I’m not interested enough in an old gaming company’s files to go snooping.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” she hissed. Her eyes softened as she stared back at him. “They’ve done OSes for decades, and you’re too fond of back doors.”

He leered, one eyebrow hovering. “And how do you know about that, Lupo? Been snooping around on my hard drive?”

Her cheeks colored. “Never mind that,” she growled. “You stick close to Fargo and keep him out of trouble and your nose clean.”

“Don’t worry,” he chuckled, still leering, “I’ll keep my nose out of back doors until we both get back here.”

She turned away, her face burning, as Fargo called out, “Come on, Zane, the car’s here.”

\---

The unmistakeable scent of fresh popcorn drifted through the eighteenth floor employee lounge. Roy Kleinberg tugged open a puffed bag fresh from the microwave and dumped the kernels into a plastic bowl. “So,” he said carefully, “not that I’m saying we should take a random hacker’s advice, but - why are we holding on to the defense contracts, anyway?”

“Money,” Alan admitted. “That, and there are a couple of NASA contracts I’d really love to see us working on, and the way to NASA tends to go through the Defense Department right now.” He tossed back a couple of kernels. “At least, that’s what the Boeing guys tell me.”

“Or through the Department of Energy, maybe,” Sam added, grabbing a handful of popcorn. “But they’re a tougher row to hoe, bureaucracy-wise, right?”

“Sure, but how badly do we need the money?” Roy pulled up a well-worn chair and cracked open a soda.

“We’ll need as much as we can get until _Paranoids Online_ is out of start-up and the stock price has stabilized,” Alan explained. “Which may take six months to a year, after the shake-up we’ve just had.”

Roy sighed. “Okay. So we need the current contracts, even if we avoid taking any new ones.”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t mind the satellite ones, honestly. I’d like to avoid anything explicitly militarized, but spy satellites and missile tracking don’t seem like - I dunno, I don’t feel like a war-monger, you know?”

“I hear you.” Roy took a long sip. “So, we have one hacker who seems to be coming from inside the system. Any external breaches?”

“Not that I can find,” Sam answered, slouching and sinking deeper into the old couch.

Alan shook his head. “I ran the logs. If he’s coming in from outside, he’s doing it wirelessly and then transitioning flawlessly into the internal fiber-optic system.”

“No fingerprints?”

“None.”

Roy pondered this over a pair of kernels. “So if this is an internal problem, why do we need external help?”

“If it were just me,” Alan said cautiously, “I’d say we don’t. But if the Department of Defense decides it needs to make sure our system is clean, _and_ they actually have someone on the payroll who has skills we’re missing, then I think there’s no way we can turn them down cleanly.” He stood up and made a beeline for the soda machine. “And if they don’t have any skills we’re missing, I don’t think they’ll be too dangerous even if they have some access to the system.”

“You can totally keep track of them,” Sam volunteered. “In the system, I mean. You’ve tracked me before.”

“We both can. That’s not the point,” Roy chided. “If we’re going to accept their help at all, we might as well let them have free access. I don’t see the point of letting the Pentagon guys in at all if we’re not going to, you know, open the kimono all the way.”

“Whoa, bad visuals,” Sam laughed.

Alan frowned. “I think they’re contractors, not Pentagon employees. And I wasn’t planning on giving them access to the core processors, just the ones our prankster has been fooling around on.” He dropped a handful of change into the machine, waited for the thud, and retrieved a cold can from the slot. “Why are we out of diet orange soda again?”

“That’s pretty much all of them, actually,” Sam pointed out. “So Roy, you’re against the idea of letting them in at all, but if we’re gonna do it, go all the way?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Roy scowled at the bowl. “Should I pop another bag?”

“Nah, we’re good.” Sam glanced at Alan as he took his seat again. “And you want to corral them in a playpen.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Alan said, “but I guess that’s basically right.”

Sam nodded. “So, in the spirit of having the buck stop here, let’s start with them in a contained area and then see how they do. If they can get out of it by themselves, then I say we don’t stop them.”

“Unless they’re going to do damage,” Alan added.

“Sure. But if they’re good, they won’t.” Roy scooped the last kernels from the bowl. “Hey, we could start them in the laser lab. They won’t understand any of the equipment down there - that’s all the DoE’s department, if the government guys know it at all - and there aren’t too many connections to the main system from down there, so monitoring them would be easier.”

Alan flinched. “That’s, ah, we have a lot of active projects going on right now.”

“Really?” Sam shifted his weight. “Like what?”

“Distance temperature measurements, for one thing.” Alan sat down again, his face a mess of frown lines.

Roy leaned towards him. “Hey, are you still thinking about Lora’s project?”

“That’s long been mothballed.” Alan dismissed the idea with a wave. “I think we should start them with the firewall servers. Maybe they can detect this guy’s entry point; we’re not doing too well on that ourselves, and they’re pretty self-contained.”

Sam straightened up in the chair. “Hey, guys, there was one other thing I wanted to ask you about.”

The two older men shared a glance, then looked back at him, expectantly.

He cleared his throat. “So, I’ve been thinking - maybe our prankster is an inside job, but not someone inside the company.”

Alan frowned. “Not an employee, you mean?”

Sam looked at his hands and decided to go for broke. “I mean, not a person.”

There was a long, silent pause. Roy shuffled one foot on the floor. “Go on.”

“I mean,” Sam continued, “maybe we’re getting messages from a program.”

“Like our hacker wrote a program to send you the messages, and just embedded it in the system?” Alan shook his head. “But it’s been responding to you, hasn’t it? No one could write one program with enough responses to cover anything you could say or do in response.”

Sam’s eyes were still on his hands; he clenched them into fists and relaxed them again. “Maybe - maybe the code is complex enough to improvise.”

The next pause was finally broken by Roy again. “You sound just like your dad,” he said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.

Alan chuckled. “Flynn Lives, indeed.”

“Forget about Dad,” Sam grumbled, “is it possible?”

Again, Alan and Roy shared a glance Sam couldn’t read. “AI’s not exactly our strong suit,” Roy explained. “If Walter were still around, he might be able to answer the question, but -”

“But for the moment, let’s assume we have a flesh-and-blood hacker somewhere, even if he did just plant a program to taunt us from the inside,” Alan finished. “And now that we have a plan for the Defense guys, I think we should all get some sleep before they arrive. They know we’re geeks already; no point in looking the part.”

“I’m too good a jock to be a geek,” Sam complained as they filed out the lounge door.

\---

The cabbie’s look said “Oh, great, a nerd and a slacker” far more eloquently than words could. He dropped his cigarette butt unceremoniously out the window and popped the back hatch, watching through the mirrors as Fargo and Zane loaded in their bags. “Where to, guys?”

“Did Mansfield get us a hotel?” Zane asked, already sounding bored.

“No, theoretically ENCOM is making the arrangements for housing us for the duration.” Fargo slid into the back seat; it smelled like cheap air freshener and stale tobacco, with a side of old bubblegum. “ENCOM Tower, please.”

“Sure thing.” The cabbie started the meter as Zane folded himself in and closed the door. “You guys interviewing? I didn’t know they’d started hiring again.”

“Consulting, actually,” Fargo replied, fastening his seatbelt and hugging his briefcase.

Zane leaned against the side panel and closed his eyes, adding “We’re in computer security.” Fargo flinched silently.

“Making sure all those executive guys they fired don’t have access anymore? Sure, I can see them needing a few extra hands on that.” The cabbie seemed vaguely amused. “Never in my life seen that many people downsized who deserved it. Can’t say I didn’t laugh about it.” He dodged between a bus and an SUV; Fargo’s knuckles went white on his valise. The cabbie continued, “The Flynn kid, he’s a fun kid. Little wild to run a company, though, know what I mean? If they keep him as a figurehead, and have the old engineers who’re still around run the company, they’ll do all right.” He paused as the light ahead of them turned red, and stopped just in time. “What’d you think?”

“I loved him parachuting into the big announcement,” Zane said, cracking one eye open and smirking. “That was pitch-perfect, you know? Stealing the limelight from Dr. Bradley and making it clear he wasn’t changing, all in one move.”

Fargo muttered, “Yeah, you would.”

“That was fun,” the cabbie conceded, “but not exactly how you tell the world you’re ready to leave the pranks behind, you know?”

“Hope he’s not going to,” Zane answered. “I’d hate for ENCOM to go back to being just another boring company with another boring CEO, right?”

Fargo mumbled imprecations under his breath for twenty more blocks, until finally the cabbie pulled up next to a huge parking garage. “Here you go, guys. Can’t park at the front door. That’ll be $30.28.”

“Keep the tip.” Fargo handed him a $50 bill and mentally marked it up to Mansfield’s tab, glad to have his feet back on solid concrete.

\---

Sam straightened the collar on his t-shirt and tugged the blazer’s cuffs into place. “Man, this is too hot. How do you guys manage with the extra shirt?” he whispered to Alan, who seemed perfectly comfortable in his extra layer - two, counting the vest.

“Practice,” Alan commented as the elevator dinged. Still, he straightened slightly as the doors slid open, disgorging a short man with a receding hairline in a grey three-piece suit and a taller, unshaven one in jeans and a rumpled flannel.

The one in the suit smiled nervously and stepped forward, right hand outstretched, but not quite at either one of them. “Good morning. I’m Dr. Douglas Fargo, contracting for the Department of Defense, and this is my employee, Dr. Zane Donovan.”

Sam leaned forward and shook hands. “Hey. I’m Sam Flynn, and I guess I’m sort of in charge of this place at the moment.”

“And the great Alan Bradley needs no introduction,” Zane drawled; Fargo’s head swiveled around, startled. Alan raised one eyebrow, but took the offered hand. Zane pumped it, meeting Alan’s gaze with a grin. “The Pink Paranoids hack was a thing of beauty.”

“I’m, ah, I’m surprised you’ve heard of it,” Alan said, catching himself in the middle of the sentence.

Fargo coughed. “Actually, it’s still kind of a thing in hacker circles,” he admitted. “But Zane, it was ‘Isolated Thinker’ that pulled that off, remember.”

“Whoops.” Zane actually looked slightly abashed. “Did I just out you? Sorry, I figured it was old enough -”

“Older than you, I’m guessing,” Alan said, but he allowed himself a smile.

Sam cocked his head. “What teenage indiscretion of yours are they talking about?”

“Not teenaged, I’m afraid.” The corners of Alan’s eyes crinkled as he coughed lightly into one closed hand. “Just after Fly-, um, after your dad wrote Space Paranoids and Dillinger swiped it, I snuck an easter egg into the code of the first home-system release. If you made three left turns in a particular cul-de-sac in the maze and then hit Control-Alt-P, then all of the Paranoids turned pink and the name on the high score changed to ISO.” He coughed again, as if he were suppressing a chuckle. “Remember, first of all, as far as I knew at the time, Dillinger had written it, although in retrospect I should have recognized Flynn’s code. And secondly, it sounds really simple, but -”

“But it was one of the first easter eggs recorded,” Zane finished. “Paving the way for thousands more to come.”

“So you guys are pretty old-school,” Sam observed.

Zane said “Nah,” at the same time that Fargo said, “Well,” and they both stopped. Zane continued, “In our regular line of work, we’re both pretty cutting-edge, but you gotta learn the old stuff.”

Fargo adjusted his glasses. “Especially when you have to deal with legacy code, which we do all the time.”

“Well, legacy code may be what we’re chasing here,” Sam said. “Either that, or someone who can slip through security holes that aren’t supposed to even be there.”

“But you know how that is,” Zane answered. “I mean, security hacking around here is part of what you do on a regular basis.”

Sam paused. “I’m more into the physical aspects. Getting into a room you’re not supposed to be in, I’m your man. Getting into a file you’re not supposed to be in - I can do it, but . . .”

“And that’s why we’re here,” Fargo jumped in. We have a brief description of the problem from General Mansfield. Can you show us the hardware that’s been affected so far?”

“I thought we’d start with-” Alan began, but Sam jumped in. “Well, that’d involve inspecting a desk,” he said, half-joking.

“Done it before,” Zane said, shrugging.

Fargo squared his shoulders. “Lead the way, Mr. Flynn.”

\---

Alan squinted at the chaos that had erupted all over Sam’s office. The scruffy one - Donovan, right? - was sprawled in the leather desk chair. He’d pulled it over to a small table Dickerson had scrounged from one of the other offices, and proceeded to run about a dozen diagnostics on the presentation laptop, half of which Alan had never seen before and one of which he didn’t even quite follow. With a certain amount of surprise, he’d pronounced it clean. Now he was busily disassembling the laptop; pieces of the exterior paneling were piled precariously close to the edge of the table.

On the other side of the room, in front of the window-wall, Dr. Fargo had all but disappeared into the desk; chunks of electronics were sitting in neat rows between him and the glass. An occasional exclamation of surprise echoed out of the cabinet and into the rest of the room. One particularly loud one was followed by a thump and a groan.

Sam leaned down and peered into the hollow in the middle of the desk. “You all right in there?”

“I’m fine.” Fargo crawled halfway out, glancing at his phone and then rapidly placing it back in his chest pocket. “Just bumped my head on a steel rack I didn’t expect to be there.”

“Steel?” Zane seemed unconcerned about his boss’s cranial trauma. “Not aluminum?”

“Nope.” Fargo shifted position; now his head was visible above the dark glass surface of the desk. From Alan’s position, he looked disembodied, floating between the skyline and the reflection of the orange clouds above; Alan blinked hard to remove the image from his mind. Fargo continued, “This must have been constructed originally in, what, 1980?”

“ ’79, I think,” Alan corrected. “What gave it away?”

“No one’s ever bothered removing the old hardware when they’ve upgraded it,” Fargo said, leaning down to poke at something with a tiny screwdriver and smudging the glass with his nose. “I guess it’s always been small enough to fit in the space created by removing the old memory? There’s most of what must have been a clone of the F-1 in here.”

Sam’s eyebrows rose. “There’s a rocket engine in my desk?”

Zane’s jaw had already dropped. “You mean a Super Foonly? How -”

“I don’t know,” Fargo answered, shrugging and scooting out, “but take a look.”

Zane scuttled around the desk, a tiny but very bright flashlight in his hand. He disappeared for a moment, then whistled long and low. “Sure enough. It’s not a perfect replica, but - that would have had incredible graphics capacity for its time.”

“And insane I/O speeds,” Fargo agreed. “Connected to a hell of a CRT monitor; it was good enough it looks like it was used right up until the flatscreen LCD was installed.”

Zane tapped on something inside the desk; the desktop shook slightly. “And they left it in, too.”

“Can you blame them? Think of how heavy that’s got to be.” Fargo shifted to his hands and knees and looked very closely at the dark glass surface. “Hey, Mr. Flynn, could you point to where the original message appeared?”

“Sure.” Sam ambled over and pointed at the general area of the desktop.

Fargo nodded. “That’s not part of the liquid crystal display. Whoever sent that activated the cathode ray tube.” He rummaged in the guts of the desk. “There’s still an active motherboard attached to it - part of the last system but one that was installed, I’d guess.”

Alan came around the edge of the desk. “Is it still connected to the ENCOM intranet?”

Zane traced a pair of cables. “Not directly, but it’s connected to the main power supply and to the back end of the current display.” He leaned back and met Alan’s eyes. “This has got to be an inside job. Your laptop’s got nothing - for what Mansfield showed us to happen at all, the onscreen message has to have been piggybacked from the main system on the sync packets.”

Alan’s mouth drew into a small, tight frown. “Wait - those shouldn’t be able to carry that sort of information.”

“Nope.” Zane stood up carefully, avoiding putting a handprint on either the desk or the window. “But if they did, there wouldn’t be a record of it, and there isn’t. And that’s the only signal the laptop was getting that I can’t search or trace.”

“It’s got to be the Dillinger kid,” Sam muttered. “This was his dad’s desk - maybe he had a secret bug in it somewhere.”

“Unless it involves using the interior rack as an antenna,” Fargo reported, “I don’t think so. There’s a lot of stuff in here, but I recognize everything.”

Zane ran one hand through his hair and turned to Sam. “Did you record the server activation trace you said you did?”

“Sure, but it’s not going to make much sense without a map of the server farm in front of you,” Sam answered, tugging his phone from his pocket.

“Let me see it anyway,” Zane demanded, hand out. Sam shrugged and pulled up the app. Fargo crowded in, peering over Sam’s shoulder as Zane analyzed the blinking dots.

“That was . . . weird,” Fargo declared.

“Sure was,” Zane agreed. “And yeah, I think we need to see the territory.” He handed the phone back to Sam. “Take me to your servers.”

\---

“I’m still impressed he got the laptop back together that fast,” Sam said to Alan in a half-whisper.

Zane was pacing slowly down the long aisle of the server farm, watching Sam’s phone. Sam cradled the laptop in the crook of his elbow, watching for messages. Fargo had his own device out, something that reminded Alan of the thing with the lights from that old movie with the ghosts taking over New York. Both members of the tiger team were intent on their electronics, barely aware of the ENCOM executives.

“Anything?” Zane called, finally looking up as he reached the end of a row.

“Nope,” Sam hollered back. “Not a peep.”

Zane frowned. “I wonder why.” He looked down and added, “And you ought to have someone steam-clean this carpet.”

“Remember,” Sam shouted across the racks, “except for the ones your boss the general saw, all the messages have come when I’ve been alone.”

Fargo lifted his eyes from his device. “Maybe we should all go to one end and leave you over here?”

“Maybe.” Sam turned a corner and edged along the side isle until he couldn’t see the others. His screen remained resolutely blank. “Nope, nothing over here.”

Faintly, he heard Fargo’s voice from the other end of the room, asking to see the original activation trace. After some shuffling, Zane arrived about twenty feet further down the aisle. “You came in through the same door we did, right?”

“Yup,” Same answered. “Why does -”

Zane spun on one heel and darted off again. Sam shrugged and followed, ending up rendezvousing with Fargo just north of the center of the room. Fargo was holding a strip of paper with bright yellow stickers; Sam glanced around, and noticed several small groups of servers bearing the yellow dots.

“I think,” Fargo said very deliberately, “that we can exclude the racks that are not dotted as sources of the problem.”

Alan jogged up just in time to hear the news. “Well, I guess that reduces the problem by an order of magnitude, at least,” he said, “but that’s still a pretty big group.”

Zane pointed. “Can you tell us whether there’s anything these groups have in common?”

Alan turned. “Most of these are data storage. Each project group has assigned servers, so everyone on the team can share access, and then we have memory backups,” he explained. “This group and that one are mostly the Paranoids Online group, but pretty much every group on floors seven through eighteen would have access to at least one of these server racks.”

Sam turned to the one group of yellow stickers that Alan hadn’t indicated. “What about these racks?”

Alan inhaled and blew it out slowly. “That’s the basement - Labs 1A and 1B.”

“Labs?” Zane’s ears had pricked up. “What sort of labs?”

Sam glanced at Alan. “The big project,” he said before Alan tried to answer, “is using lasers to do accurate temperature measurement at a distance.”

Fargo blinked. “What sorts of distances?”

“The 1A group is working on short-distance applications,” Alan broke in. “Everything from oven sensors to pinpoint application of cooling resources in microcomputer systems.”

Zane nodded. “And 1B is long-distances?”

“Yeah.” Alan looked uncomfortable.

“How long?” Fargo prompted again.

“From low earth orbit,” Alan finished.

Sam’s eyes widened. “Really? Is that one of the satellite applications from the presentation?”

“It is,” Alan admitted. “And possibly the project that the general sent you guys here to check out; is that right?”

Fargo opened and closed his mouth like a fish; after a long, uncomfortable pause, Zane clapped him on the shoulder and laughed. “You got us. Mansfield wanted us to get a sneak peek to make sure you guys are on schedule.”

“That’s not -” Fargo started, and caught himself. He cleared his throat and lowered his eyebrows. “You, uh, you weren’t supposed to _tell_ them.”

“What could it hurt? They figured it out.” Zane winked broadly, and continued, “But we really are a security team, too, and we are here to help catch your hacker.”

“And if they’ve possibly gotten into the satellite project,” Fargo pointed out, “the DoD really does need to know.”

“I know,” Alan sighed. “I just - I’ve spent twenty years dealing with corporate espionage here.”

“The Flynn Lives movement,” Fargo supplied.

“No, actually,” Alan said with a half-grin, “unlike some of the previous CEOs, I’ve never thought of them as much of a threat. They were looking for information that - well, frankly, that I wouldn’t have minded seeing out in the open, if it existed. No, I’m talking about our competitors. Jobs and Ballmer are not particularly nice people, and the guys they hire are even less pleasant.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not particularly happy adding the government to that list.”

“Think of it this way,” Zane said, hands spread. “It’s not like we’re the IRS. Unless the project’s so far behind schedule it can’t be salvaged, all we’re going to be telling Mansfield is that it exists and whether you’re behind or not.” He smiled ingratiatingly. “So - can we see the lab?”

“Sure,” Sam agreed, jumping in before Alan could argue.

“Lasers,” Fargo moaned. “Why did it have to be lasers?”

Zane’s voice lowered. “Just don’t push any buttons.”

“No,” Alan said firmly, “button-pushing is definitely off the menu.” He gave Fargo an appraising look as they headed back towards the elevators.

\---

“Really, the interesting stuff is happening in the small-distance lab,” Alan said in a tone like a college professor.

Sam looked around. The laser lab bay was huge, more like a warehouse than a clean room. He’d known it was here, even toured it a couple of times, but never paid it much attention; it wasn’t a big source of income for ENCOM. Housing a semi-secret government project made the racks of wires and lenses seem much cooler, somehow.

“The temperature-reading technology already exists,” Fargo noted, “but if you guys are making big improvements in accuracy -”

“That too,” Alan agreed, “but we’re also working on more traditional computer-related projects. For example, we’ve got a couple of improved memory storage projects - Mackey had them mothballed, but we’re dusting them off and getting them running again.”

“Still laser-based technology?” Zane was running around the lab like an excited twelve-year-old, poking and prodding at everything. “This doesn’t look like you’re that far behind, honestly. I mean, the demo model here is fully functional, right?”

“It is, but we’re having more issues scaling it up than we thought,” Alan admitted. “Nothing we can’t solve with more testing. And yes, we’re looking at the next generation of read/write optical media, with better data density than Blu-Ray.”

“Not that hard,” Fargo muttered, eyes tracking several cranes on overhead rails. “Do you guys ever throw anything away? The amount of legacy technology you have down here is -” he swallowed “- astonishing.”

“Dad was never very good at that,” Sam said with an apologetic grin. “I guess the house he built took after him.”

“It wasn’t just him,” Alan added, looking down and smiling faintly. “None of us were - even Walter forgot to put his tools away half the time.” He turned back towards Zane. “And honestly, with the exception of the satellite project, Mackey was using a lot of these labs as storage - keeping around things he wanted to keep the patent on, but never intended for ENCOM to produce.”

“What a selfish ass,” Zane muttered, and Sam nodded in agreement. “Hey, is there an open terminal down here, or should we set up the laptop again?”

“I think,” Sam said, turning around, “that there are a couple of networked desktops over there -”

Fargo yelped; something large and soft slid to the floor. Zane sprang into action, leaping over a cooling chamber and darting around what looked like a very large oscilloscope. Sam and Alan followed after him.

“Oh, good, you didn’t shoot yourself,” Zane laughed. “Scared me there.”

Fargo was standing in front of a complex apparatus with several lenses. It looked old, much older than the satellite laser and its accoutrements; a canvas dust cover curled and pooled at his feet.

Fargo’s hands were shaking.

“Hey, hey,” Zane soothed. “It’s okay. No one got shot.”

“It is _not_ okay, Donovan,” Fargo growled through gritted teeth. “Do you know what this is?”

Zane stepped back. “Uh, no. Give me a minute.”

Alan pushed past him. “It’s an old experiment,” he explained, talking just a hint too quickly. “This one really is mothballed. The two people who really understood how it worked - well, three, eventually, but -”

Zane sucked air through his incisors noisily. “Oh, man. This is -”

“A teleportation experiment,” Fargo finished loudly. “These are _illegal_ , guys; they’re a violation of the Philadelphia Treaty of 1944.”

“It’s not teleportation,” Alan insisted. “It’s a digitizer.”

“A what?” Zane’s left eyebrow went up.

Fargo wheeled around, his face reddening. “That’s just a semantic difference. The method of teleportation doesn’t matter; it’s still - I mean, if those guys from that project in Wales saw this, we could be facing a major diplomatic incident, here!”

“What are you talking about?” Alan shifted his position to stand between Fargo and the device. “Walter never said anything about any treaty.”

“Uh, Fargo?” Zane nudged him with an elbow. “You want to explain how this thing works? ‘Cause I’m not seeing it.”

Sam crowded in next to Alan. “What are they talking about? Let me see it.”

Fargo pointed. “It uses a pinpoint laser beam to scan an object and create a 3-D image of it, containing the information of its molecular structure in an array in the computer memory. Then it uses the laser to disassemble the molecular structure of the object and holds the individual molecules in suspension in the beam. It can either store the object in suspension until the laser starts to lose coherence or immediately reconstruct it, but either way, it re-composes the molecules at a different location using the array as a guide.”

“So it’s basically a Star Trek transporter,” Zane finished, awed.

Alan blinked. “You got all that by looking at it while it wasn’t even activated?”

“I’ve seen it before,” Fargo huffed. “Not this exact device, but close enough.” He turned towards Zane. “And it works okay on raw material - an ingot of gold will come out just fine - but when used on living material -”

“It’d disrupt any process that required physical momentum,” Zane realized. “Unless the computer model was sophisticated enough to record that, too.”

“Which is what Lora and Walter were working on before Walter’s stroke,” Alan said very softly.

“It was deemed too dangerous to use, and specifically classified as a prohibited form of teleportation,” Fargo finished. “Who authorized the original experiments?”

Sam edged around Alan and looked at the apparatus. “Hey,” he said softly, “I’ve seen something like this somewhere before.”

Alan held up both hands. “As far as I know, this was always a completely internal ENCOM affair.” He swallowed. “Specifically, it was my wife’s pet project.”

“Oh, man.” Zane edged towards Fargo. “Hey, this doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re here for. Maybe we can come back to this later?”

“No,” Fargo snarled. “No one knows how dangerous laser experiments can be better than I do.” He lurched forward. “Get out of the way - I need to see how much of this thing is still functional.”

Alan stood his ground. “No one here knew it was prohibited. You can’t -”

“I can, and Mansfield will back me up on it,” Fargo shouted. “Now _move_!”

“I’m not sure this is a good idea, Dr. Fargo,” Sam said as Alan ducked out of the way. “This looks like something my dad had in his basement, but it wasn’t a beam-me-up-Scotty thing, at least not like you’re talking about.”

“Then it must have been something different,” Fargo said, starting to sound more tired than angry. One hand traced the labels on a panel of switches.

Immediately, a hum came from the center of the device. Sam leaned forward. “Hey, guys, get out of the way -”

“It’s not dangerous,” Alan interrupted. “It takes much longer than that to power -”

A beam of blue and green fired from one of the lenses; Fargo froze in place as the laser scanned him and peeled him away, byte by byte.

“Fargo!” Zane dodged forward; a second beam caught him.

Sam whirled around. “Where’s the power on this thing?”

“Wait.” Alan stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “What’ll happen if you stop it in mid-process?”

Sam thought, and shuddered. “We’ve got to get them out.”

“The laser should re-constitute them automatically.” Alan paused. “It worked on the mice.”

“But you never tested it on humans.” Alan nodded, even though Sam hadn’t framed it as a question. Sam sighed, and waited.

The laser stopped, and disappeared. The apparatus fell silent.

Alan frowned. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

“It’s how it happened to me.” Sam grabbed Alan’s sleeve. “They’re in the system. This one works like Dad’s did. Come on!”

\---

Fargo slid his fingers behind his glasses, rubbing his eyes and blinking. “Oh, God,” he whispered, “they got me. The lasers finally got me. I’m dead, aren’t I.” He collapsed in slow-motion against the strangely colorless wall behind him. “And I didn’t even push a button this time!”

An eerie glow formed in the air about two feet from his right. “Is that the light?” he wondered out loud. “Am I supposed to go towards it? That’s not what it looked like last time.”

The light surged, turned into a cloud, took a vaguely human shape - then pulsed, rapidly, and became a very specific human shape.

“Zane?” Fargo moaned. “It got you, too?”

“Yeah,” Zane spat, “while I was trying to save your sorry butt.” He turned in a circle. “Where are we, and what happened to our clothes?”

“Huh?” Fargo looked down. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Zane said slowly, a rough edge in his voice, “that these used to be blue jeans, and now they’re black.” He pointed at Fargo. “You were wearing a blue shirt and a red tie, and now they’re two different shades of grey.”

“Huh.” Zane was right; their clothes were drained of almost all color. “That’s weird. Is Heaven in monochrome?”

Zane snorted loudly. “You think _I’m_ going to Heaven?”

“Well, no.” Fargo shrank against the wall again. “But I don’t want to think too much about the alternative.”

“Are there skyscrapers in Hell?” Zane was staring upwards. “ ‘Cause that’s what we’re standing between.” He stepped back, away from Fargo. “Specifically, we appear to be in a dead-end alleyway that leads to something like a loading dock.”

Fargo let his gaze follow Zane’s. He did, indeed, have his back to a tower of what looked like glass and neon, in an off-yellow color. Chartreuse, maybe. What noble gas made that color? Whatever it was, it was impressive. “Maybe a couple of art nouveau architects ended up in Hell?” he offered.

“I can’t imagine the Devil allowing anything other than strict Brutalism,” Zane countered. “Whatever. Let’s take a look at your City of Dis.”

“City of what?” Fargo trailed behind Zane as he headed towards the open end of the alley. As he approached, he could hear the sounds of what seemed like traffic, but he saw no passing vehicles, just more lines of neon.

Zane stepped out and realized belatedly that there was no sidewalk; the tower bordered the street directly. Something whooshed past his nose, too fast to make out, before he could stop himself. He tried to step back, and immediately collided with Fargo. Grabbing at the edge of the building, his fingers slipping on the surface, more like glazed ceramic than glass, he ordered “Hold on -”.

“Watch out,” Fargo complained, stepping past him and into the street. Something screeched to a halt in front of him; Fargo realized with a start that what he’d assumed was more lines of horizontal neon, white and red, were instead the lights on passing vehicles, moving far to fast to resolve. He stumbled backwards into Zane again. “What the -”

And the vehicle! It was a perfect trapezoidal prism, as long as a bus, its sides precisely vertical, its edges outlined in pale blue light. The driver, in an outlandish bodysuit chased with lines in the same greenish-yellow as the building, shouted something inaudible over the whoosh of the traffic, danced his fingers across his console - there was no steering wheel - and vanished again, accelerating nearly instantly.

Fargo stopped trying to regain his balance and sat down, hard, on the ground. “What the heck was _that_?”

“I’m not sure,” Zane said thickly, “but I know it shouldn’t be able to go from zero to a blur that quickly, no matter what kind of engine it has.”

“Right.” Fargo looked up, between the two gleaming towers; the sky was perfectly black above them. “Shouldn’t we be seeing at least some stars?”

“Not if it’s cloudy. Or smoggy.” Zane squinted. “Although I’d expect the sky to show more light pollution, in that case.” He glanced back. “I don’t see any way of getting out of this cul-de-sac along the street. Maybe I can pick the lock on the loading dock there.”

“Maybe we’ll be lucky and it won’t be locked.” Fargo stuck his hand in his pocket, then glanced down. “Hey, my phone’s not working.” He removed it and shook it. “That’s impossible. The battery shouldn’t run out for days yet!”

Zane checked his. “Mine, too.” He looked in his other pocket. “My music player’s drained too. Huh.” Glancing back at Fargo, he added, “That’s actually the first evidence in favor of your afterlife hypothesis.”

Fargo planted one hand on the wall and struggled back to this feet. “Where do you think we are, then?”

“Well, it was a teleporter, right?” Zane turned to head back towards their point of appearance. “I figure we just got zapped somewhere.”

“I don’t think so.” Fargo studied the wall. “Unless you know of someplace where they have smudge-resistant glass as a common construction material.”

“Really?” Zane planted a handprint on the wall, then removed it. “Huh. You’re right. Nothing.”

“Oh, man.” Fargo buried his head in his hands. “We really are dead. I knew this was going to happen.”

“Quit panicking, Fargo,” Zane started, but he was interrupted by the arrival of an oblique cuboid with rounded corners. Like the bus, or truck, or whatever it had been, it was outlined in more neon; this was the bright orange-red that neon usually was.

A section of one parallelogram dissolved. Zane blinked, hard; it hadn’t slid to the side, or lowered to the ground, or rolled away - it had simply disappeared. A short man in a black tunic, grey tights, and what looked like a very aerodynamic motorcycle helmet, all chased in bright blue neon, stepped out and pointed at them.

“Present identification, programs!” he barked.

“Uh, sure.” Zane reached for his wallet; beside him, Fargo fumbled for his. They handed their drivers’ licenses to him; he glanced at them, then back up. The visor on the helmet kept Zane from reading his expression, but his body language said ‘confused’ pretty clearly.

“Are you joking around?” The cop - or soldier; there was something vaguely turret-like on top of the cuboid - leaned in on them. “Present your identification discs!”

“Our what?” Fargo was shaking; the words came out as a squeak.

The guy in the helmet reached behind him and removed what looked like a glowing blue frisbee. “Your identity discs! Now!”

“We, uh, we don’t have any of those.” Zane swallowed; Fargo’s nervousness was spreading.

“Turn around!”

Zane and Fargo both obeyed. They felt one gloved hand run across both their backs, between the shoulder blades. The cop’s voice was no less loud, but slightly gentler, when he next spoke. “You haven’t been processed?”

“I guess not,” Fargo gulped. “We just got here.”

“Must have been an error at the I/O tower,” the cop muttered. The reflection of his arm in the glass gestured towards the vehicle. “Get in the tank. You can’t wander around like this. No wonder you almost crashed the SCSI bus.”

“The what?” Fargo turned around, eyes wide, but the cop just gestured towards the vehicle again. Shrugging, Zane stepped in, ducking his head, and Fargo scrambled to follow.

The doorway solidified again as soon as the cop stepped back in. He walked to the center of the vehicle, where four impossibly thin panels met in an arch, and touched one of them; the tank lurched forward, and Fargo lost his balance again.

“How long will this take?” he asked from the floor of the tank. It wasn’t sticky, wasn’t dirty, showed no sign that it had ever been walked on. The cop wasn’t wearing boots - the soles of the tights appeared to be padded slightly.

“Not long,” the cop said, not looking at them.

\---

“Like Dad’s what?” Alan asked, still staring at the reconstitution zone.

Sam raised both hands to his forehead. “Did Dad ever tell you exactly what happened on your little hacking run, with the Group Six Access and everything?”

Alan rolled his bottom lip under his teeth before answering. “He told us - a story, a metaphor for what happened. Involving my program, TRON. And Roy’s, although he didn’t know him well enough to recognize him yet.” He grinned slightly. “That changed pretty quickly.”

“It wasn’t a story,” Sam insisted. “It might have been a metaphor, but it was real, too.”

“Just because he didn’t just tell it to you as a bedtime story doesn’t mean it isn’t a fairy tale, Sam,” Alan started, his voice becoming harsher.

Sam gestured. “The thing behind his terminal when it happened - it was an earlier version of this thing, right?”

Alan nodded slowly, not saying anything.

“There’s one of these in the basement of the arcade,” Sam continued. “It did the same thing to me when I went there.”

“That’s not possible,” Alan protested. “I would have - Lora would have told me if there was another one.”

“Maybe he borrowed an older model when she upgraded,” Sam continued to argue. “At any rate, it’s there. I can show you if you want, but I think we’re in a bigger hurry than that.”

“You . . .” Alan scratched his head. “You and your father are so much alike - it’s become a shared metaphor -”

Sam slammed his hands against a filing cabinet. “You’ve run a background check on Quorra, I know you have! Where do you think she came from?”

Alan stared at him, incredulous. “Okay. Where do _you_ say she came from?”

\---

The tank came to a stop as sudden as its start; this time, both Zane and Fargo kept their footing. The opposite wall dissolved. “In there, “ the cop barked, pointing. “Just follow directions. I don’t know where your Users intended to drop you, but that wasn’t it.”

“Our what?” Zane asked, as Fargo hurried out of the vehicle.

“I said, in there!” The cop’s finger didn’t waver. Zane shrugged and followed his boss out of the vehicle and onto a narrow line of sidewalk.

The door in front of them slid into the wall; illumination poured out. “Enter, program,” stated a flat, feminine voice.

“So I guess we go in?” Zane’s question fell on deaf ears; Fargo was already hurrying inside.

The room was a featureless white except for a single glowing square on the floor. “Please enter the transport field, program,” the voice announced.

“Hey, maybe it’ll take us back?” Zane sounded hopeful.

“I don’t think so.” Fargo looked up at the luminous ceiling. “Both of us, or one at a time?”

“You will each be processed individually,” the voice replied.

Zane grinned. “Sounds a little like S.A.R.A.H.”

“No, I’m pretty sure that’s a recording,” Fargo answered. “But it’s a good one.” Carefully, Fargo stepped into the glowing square; it rose slightly from the floor and glided gently towards the opposite doorway.

“Hey, what about me?” Zane demanded. As if in response, another square materialized in the same location; he huffed, and climbed aboard.

They drifted down a long hallway. At the halfway point, a sheet of light flickered into existence for a single second; Fargo’s clothes fell away, cut neatly in half. “Hey!” he protested, grabbing at the fabric as it fell. “That was my best summer suit!”

Forewarned, Zane tried to snatch his phone from his pocket before the sheet sliced his clothes away, and almost succeeded; he managed to keep hold of half of it. Disgusted, he tossed it away and glanced down, and immediately wished he hadn’t; the floor was several stories below his transport square. The half-a-phone touched the floor and disappeared, as if it had disintegrated.

At the end of the hallway was another room, with a floor at a reasonable height; Zane sighed in relief. Two spinning prisms tumbled from an alcove and spun around them, scanning them. Slowly, something began forming around them; Zane stared as what looked for all the world like a skin-tight vinyl jumpsuit materialized around him, complete with separate gloves and boots. It was chased with blue-white light-piping; racing stripes ran down both arms and in solid lines from shoulder to ankle. The boots that encased his feet seemed to be connected to the legs of the suit, but he didn’t see any fasteners.

“You didn’t give me any boxers,” he complained. “This had better not chafe.”

Fargo was staring at the prism. “Are you here to help us?”

The prism suddenly flexed, turning spiky and golden. “Yes!” it chirped.

“Can you tell me where we are?” Fargo asked, excitement rising in his face.

It flexed again, becoming a red octahedron. “No!”

“There are six more of you in here, aren’t there?” Fargo’s outfit had taken a second longer than Zane’s; his own skintight black suit was topped with a one-shoulder tunic in a soft pearl-grey. His racing stripes were a purer white than Zane’s, and lines of the same ran along the belt and the shoulder of the tunic. His glasses had been spared, but the rims now glowed, too. A pair of slipper-like shoes in the same inky black as the bodysuit covered his feet.

“Yes!” The prism flipped once more, then darted back into the recess; Zane’s followed it.

The transport squares stopped moving. The voice announced, “Attention, programs. You will each receive an identity disc.”

“Why do you keep calling us programs?” Fargo asked the blank white ceiling, but got no answer.

“Everything that you do or learn will be imprinted on this disc,” the room continued.

“Oh, great, external memory; I could use some of that,” Zane muttered.

“If you lose your disc, or fail to follow system commands, you will be subject to immediate de-resolution,” the voice finished. Two slots opened in the ceiling, and each emitted a circle imprinted with concentric rings of light. One had circles of pure white; the other was a slightly bluer blaze. They hung in the air above their heads for a second.

“Uh, what do we do with them?” Zane finally asked.

“Place them against your back between the shoulder blades,” the voice answered.

Zane gripped his with both hands and reached behind him, over his head; to his mild surprise, the disc stuck there. He felt something like a breeze run up the back of his head. Fargo had a slightly harder time; Zane watched in amusement as he tried to flex his arm to place the disc correctly.

The voice announced, “Discs activated and synchronized.”

“So now what?” Zane didn’t really expect an answer.

The two transport squares winked out of existence, and a panel in the wall slid away. “Now you may proceed about your business,” the voice declared. “If you have no authorized business, you will be directed to the game grid.”

“That sounds like fun,” Zane grinned.

“No, it doesn’t,” Fargo corrected. “Um, thanks.” He shoved Zane through the doorway; they were once again on a narrow walkway, suspended about a story above the street below. “Oh, man.”

“What now?” Zane reached back and tugged at the disc; it came away easily in his hand. “I mean, we could try and round up a few people for a game of Ultimate, but -”

“We’re in the system,” Fargo whispered.

“What?”

“We’re inside ENCOM’s computer system,” Fargo insisted. “The laser scanned and decomposed us without recomposing us. These,” he gestured at himself and Zane, “aren’t our real bodies; they’re the memory array that the computer system is using to store the information it scanned.”

“It had better not have deleted the information about my jeans,” Zane said, grinning. “That was one of my favorite pairs.” He tossed the disc, spinning it. “These have a pretty good balance on them.”

“You don’t get it,” Fargo moaned, leaning heavily against the railing. “How are we going to get out?” He looked out across the cityscape. “They keep calling us programs because they _are_ programs. The bus driver, the cop, everyone driving one of those things down there -” he gestured wildly at the traffic below “- they’re all programs. And in here, they’re _all_ sentient.” His arms started to shake. “Every single program in here is a functional AI, Zane. Imagine it! Every program you ever wrote - every tiny subroutine - a being in its own right.” Fargo’s eyes began to glaze over. “How many is that? I can’t even count - how many individual consciousnesses have I written?”

“Hey, hey,” Zane murmured, replacing his disc and grabbing Fargo by the shoulders. “Don’t freak out on me now, Fargo. You already knew you’d written people. Or don’t you think S.A.R.A.H. and the deputy count?”

“No, they count.” Fargo took a deep breath and willed his arms to stay still. “But - there’s a difference between three or four and _thousands_.”

“Yup.” Zane looked up and down the street. “Well, I’m not 100% convinced, but I’d rather be in ENCOM’s system than in Hell. Let’s try and find someone in charge of communicating with the outside world - maybe we can at least get in touch with our clients and see what they can do for us.” A smirk crept across his face. “I’m sure they don’t want to be sued by the Department of Defense - or by Global Dynamics, if Mansfield won’t do it.”

Fargo heaved a huge sigh. “Does Henry still have the ‘lawyer’ patch?” He followed Zane’s gaze. “Not a bad plan, but - where do we even start?”

\---

“- And then we were back in the arcade basement, both of us.” Sam sank into a slightly ragged desk chair; telling the story had taken longer than he’d expected. “Dad - didn’t make it.”

Alan’s eyes were ablaze. “Do you think he’s still in there? If he is - Sam, we’ve got to get him out! We could -”

Sam shook his head; the corners of his eyes were stinging. “No, Alan. He - I checked, later. The whole system was wiped, almost. Whatever happened between him and Clu, I don’t think he survived it. If we re-rezzed him here in the real world, I think we’d just get a body.”

Alan buried his head in his hands. “That’d still be more closure than I’ve had for twenty years,” he groaned. Then his head came up. “Oh, God, Sam, I’m sorry - I didn’t mean -”

“No, no, it’s cool, Alan, I get it.” Sam daubed away the tear that was threatening to run down the inside of his nose. “This has been pretty tough on you.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “So - you believe me now?”

“I don’t know,” Alan sighed. “I believe you believe it, and it makes Quorra make sense. The P.I. I hired to find out who she was came back with _nothing,_ no past at all, and that shouldn’t even be possible.” He paused, then continued in a softer voice, “And I never believed your dad would just abandon you. ENCOM, maybe; me, even, maybe, but - never you.”

“So,” Sam said cautiously, “can we at least take my theory as a working hypothesis until you come up with something better?”

“Sounds reasonable.” Alan rubbed the back of his neck, and looked back at the apparatus. “But then - are they going to have to wait for some portal to open in our system to leave?”

“I don’t think so. The system I was in was a personal playground of Dad’s - he’d built it from the compiler up. That was why he was so stoked when the isos appeared; they were the first things in there that he hadn’t created,” Sam explained. “They evolved. But to get out of ENCOM’s system, the first time, he had to ride out on an output beam, right?”

“The Master Control Program’s output stream,” Alan corrected. “There’s no such program in the system now.”

“On the other hand,” Sam argued, “pretty much any given program is as complex now as the MCP was then, right?”

“Not quite. That thing was huge; it had absorbed the subroutines of thousands of other programs.” The apparatus creaked slightly as Alan inspected the terminal it was attached to.

Sam slumped in his chair. “Maybe we can find where in the system that thing stored their patterns and yank them out?”

“How would we do that?” Alan looked like he was more willing to accept Sam’s story by the second.

“I don’t know.” Sam jammed his hand in his pocket. “Let me ask someone with more experience in there than I have.”

Alan waited silently as Sam swiped his thumb across his phone’s screen. They waited out two rings with their breath held.

“Hello?”

Sam exhaled at the sound of Quorra’s voice. “Hey. Um, we have a situation up here.” He described the events of the previous twenty minutes in as close detail as he could manage. “Do you know how the exit point would work in a system Dad didn’t design?”

“No,” said the voice over the phone, and Sam’s stomach lurched. “But,” she continued, “give me a few minutes to get up there, and I’ll do everything I can to help you get them back.”

\---

“That’s . . . impressive,” Zane marveled. Fargo just stared.

A wide, curving sweep of an edifice, coated in brilliant mirror-reflectivity, made half the stadiums Zane had ever visited seem like mere bowls. And yet this was merely the base of the structure; a tall, thin frustrum of spun glass and metal ribbon rose gleaming from its center, taller than the skyscrapers that huddled around it like foothills, and from its bulbous tip a beam of cerulean light leapt into the dark and starless sky above. Smaller, lighter beams in orange and yellow intersected the conical spire from every direction, spokes on a wheel with its rim at infinity, at - Zane counted - at least six different levels. Motes of light and shadow flashed down the beams, going and coming at speeds his eye could barely follow.

Fargo realized he was gaping and closed his mouth. “It’s an I/O node attached to an intranet hub,” he stated, his voice betraying his awe.

Zane tore his eyes away from the spire and searched the base. “Looks like there’s more than one door. Does it matter which one we go in?”

“I can’t tell,” Fargo replied, scratching his head. “We can lurk around and see who goes in which door -”

“Or we can march right in and see if anyone stops us,” Zane interrupted, grabbing Fargo by the wrist and hauling him across the busy plaza.

The door led into a round atrium the size of a football field; programs rushed through, huddled in knots, as they headed towards a dozen glass elevators spaced around the rim. Fargo swung his head from side to side. “Which one?” he whispered, barely audible above the noise. “I don’t see anything like a directory anywhere.”

Zane pointed with his chin. “Maybe she can help?”

A program in a floor-length robe and a tall, three-tiered hat was striding purposefully towards them, staff in hand. She stopped barely a yard away. Fargo shrank back; she was taller than Zane and had an aura of authority.

“Are you here to speak to the Users,” she asked in a cool but courteous tone, “or are you looking for a transport?”

“Which Users can you speak to from here?” Fargo blurted.

“Why, _your_ User, of course,” she answered, her eyes betraying only the slightest hint of amusement. “And any other User who needs to relay you a message.”

“So, like, if a User who wasn’t _my_ User had sent me a message, we could pick it up here?” Zane leaned in front of Fargo, gesturing at him to hush.

“That would, of course, depend on who you are,” she said dryly.

“I, ah, I’m Zane and this is Fargo.” He pointed at each of them in turn. “We’re kind of new around here.”

Fargo pushed his way around him. “And we were hoping there would be something from Alan Bradley or Sam Flynn for us?”

She blinked at them, startled. “Your names for your Users are . . . strange.”

“Or anything from them at all, really,” Zane filled in. “Whether it was specifically for us or not.”

Now her expression was equal parts amusement and disapproval. “You know I cannot reveal the comings and goings of the Users to those they do not specify,” she scolded. “What passes between any program and their User is sacred; we who keep their temples hold their communications in highest confidence.”

“Whoa,” Zane cried, holding up both hands, “Sorry if we stepped on your toes, ma’am. Like I said, we’re new around here.”

“I think we ended up in this memory sector by mistake,” Fargo added. “Can you tell me which hub we’re at?”

She cocked her head at him; her headdress - which reminded Zane vaguely of the Pharaoh’s crown from ancient Egypt, the one that was shaped something like a bowling pin - shook slightly as she looked down. “This is Node 441F28; more accurately, the upper tier is the travel hub for the node. Where were you supposed to be?”

“We’re supposed to be inspecting the temperature-measuring programs for the laser lab,” Fargo tried.

“I don’t know where the ‘laser lab’ is,” she mused, “but the temperature crew is mostly at Node 441F16.” She frowned. “How did you get thrown this far off course, then?” Her eyes slid down Fargo and back up, stopping at his glasses. “You look - strange. What are these?” Her long fingers reached for his face.

“Ah,” Fargo said as he dodged, “they’re a visual focal subroutine. Part of the laser set-up.”

“You feel . . . different.”

Fargo looked frantic. “Can you describe the layout of the nearby nodes to me? I think I might know where we went wrong.”

She frowned again, but she stepped back and raised her staff. “We are here,” she stated, drawing a dot of light in midair. “Node 441F16 is here . . .”

Zane stared at the map as she drew it, trying to memorize it while Fargo asked questions. She looked like she was becoming more suspicious by the second, but of what, he wasn’t sure. Suspicious people tended to blame him for things. He’d rather stay out of the way.

A cluster of programs to their left abruptly stopped their chattering as another program pushed through them. Zane was already staring when he reached behind him, pulled out his disc, and pointed directly at Zane and Fargo. “Priestess, stand aside!” he barked.

She looked up from her diagram. “Stand aside from what?” If her voice had been cool with them before, it was ice-cold now.

“From these rogue programs.” Their antagonist was dressed the same as the traffic cop from earlier, but his suit was a dull light grey embossed all over with gleaming red. “They’re intruders, security risks.”

“And what, precisely, have they done to pose a risk to the system, except for being hopelessly lost?” She drew up her staff, holding it in front of her like a badge of office.

“They have choked the free flow of information! They have befouled the grid-lines! They conspire with those who would bring down the whole network!” The new program was nearly spitting as he growled out each accusation.

“I have _no_ idea what he’s talking about,” Zane said, displaying both palms face-up and empty.

“Me either,” whimpered Fargo.

“Then face me, cowards!” The program in red brandished his disc. “I challenge you for your honor!”

The priestess began stalking towards him. “This is a sacred place, program, not the game grid!”

“And this is not your fight, guardian!” The red program snapped his wrist, and his disc hurtled towards Zane’s head at a speed much faster than a frisbee.

“Hey!” Zane ducked, and the disc sped by above his head. “Since when are head-shots legal?”

“Look out, it’s coming back!” Fargo shouted, and dove to the floor. The programs behind them shrieked and scattered.

Zane twisted around, reaching for his own disc as the red one shot past again. He wasn’t terribly surprised to see the red program catch it, spin around, and fire again without losing momentum. The anger on the program’s face was freaking him out a little, though.

“Man, what did we do to you?” he grumbled, dodging again.

The priestess was busy herding the crowd back. “Your disc,” she cried as she guided a shaking program towards the door, “use it to block!”

“Huh?” The red disc boomeranged again; Zane brought up his own disc and it ricocheted away.

“Take him out!” the priestess shouted. “I give you permission! Just this once!”

“Okay, if you say so.” Zane fired his own disc, a quick snap from the shoulder; the red program dove to the side, barely snagging his own disc on the rebound.

“Beginner’s luck,” snarled the program, and took another shot, throwing high and to the side.

Zane dodged again. “No, seriously, I used to play Ultimate a lot.” He caught his disc left-handed and flipped it around. “I mean, it’s been a few years, but you always remember.” His shot was low and tight. “It’s kind of like riding a bike -”

The disc caught the red program squarely in the chest. He barely had time to yell; a spray of pixels blew out behind him, and he crumbled as if he were made of sugar cubes.

Fargo made a noise somewhere between a hiccup and a bleat. Zane caught the disc as it returned, eyes wide.

“Holy shit - did I . . .”

“He’s de-rezzed,” the priestess announced, as the pixels winked out in tiny bursts of red light. “He’ll not be bothering us again.”

“I didn’t know these were lethal,” Zane whispered, staring at his disc.

“I do not want this to become an extended incident. You should not be here when the security forces arrive,” the priestess stated. “Where do you want to go?”

Fargo picked himself up off the floor. “Okay, I’m pretty sure the signal from the laser array that landed us in this sector did come through this tower, but it didn’t originate here. F16 is as good a place to start as any; how do we get there from here?”

She tapped a node in her light-drawing before erasing it with a sweep of her staff. “I’ll send you to Hub 441-Prime; it has connections to there directly. Go to Tier 4 and take the gold transport heading directly away from the city center.” She met Fargo’s eyes; he struggled not to flinch. “If anyone asks you for a fare, give them this.” She raised her staff and drew an at-sign in his palm. “Tell them the tower guardian gave it to you.”

“Okay. Uh, thanks.” Fargo closed his hand around the glowing white @. “Come on, Zane, let’s go.”

“I hope someone kept a backup copy of that guy,” Zane whimpered as Fargo dragged him through the slowly-returning crowd.

\---

“You’re seriously putting your desk back together right now?” Alan plucked off his bifocals and rubbed them absently on his shirt.

“There’s not a lot of together that needs doing,” Sam replied, sliding the front panel back into place. “Most of what Dr. Fargo did was pull out the stuff that wasn’t being used.” He keyed at the invisible keyboard; the desk lit up. “If nothing else, she’ll need to see the security camera images of them. Figured that’ll be easier on the desktop than the laptop or the pad.”

The intercom beeped. “Someone here to see you, sir,” Dickerson announced.

“Send her on in.” Sam dragged the chair back into its place. “Let me see where there’s been any unusual activity in the system.”

“I thought the plan was you didn’t go off getting into trouble without me?” Quorra strode into the room, then stopped short in front of a pair of disembodied 5” floppy drives. “Or are you digging them out by hand?”

“If we could, I’d be doing it,” Sam grumbled. He pushed back from the terminal and met her gaze. “I need you to tell Alan where you come from.”

She froze. Very slowly, she murmured, “I though we’d agreed that I wasn’t ever to tell _anyone_ my origins.”

“That was when I thought the other side of the screen and this one were going to stay safely separated.” Sam leaned over the display on the desk; there were several activity peaks, but none of them seemed related to each other. “Looks like I was a little optimistic on that front.”

“Very well.” She straightened up and faced Alan directly. “I am not, technically, a human being. I was not born in this world.”

“Okay,” Alan replied, drawing the word out slightly. “Sam already told me as much. So - what are you?”

“From your point of view, I would be a program.” She shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. “Specifically, I am an isomorphic algorithm.”

“So -” Alan broke off, glancing out of the window at the bright daylight outside. “Did Flynn write you?”

“No,” Quorra and Sam said at once. Quorra shot him a grateful look, then continued, “The isos weren’t written, either by a User or by another program. We evolved out of the system itself, once it became irreducibly complex.” She showed him the mark on her arm; he blinked, uncomprehending.

“That was why Dad was so jazzed, right before he disappeared,” Sam filled in. “His little sandbox system had done the equivalent of spontaneously generating life.”

“I see.” Alan’s eyes turned up to the ceiling. “So - the system generated its own processes that were analogous to ones already programmed, but not actually using any User-generated code?”

“Pretty much,” Sam replied. “Man, why does our memory allocation system generate so much signal noise?”

“Because the allocators haven’t been defragmented in half a decade,” Alan answered, glad he understood at least something. “Yeah, that would be something to get excited about, all right.” He edged forward. “But - how did you get out?”

“I’m not sure,” Quorra admitted. “Sam’s theory was that once the matter of a human body, or any other matter de-rezzed by the laser -”

“Digitized,” Alan corrected automatically.

“- Digitized, then, by the laser, stays in a sort of stasis.” She looked uncomfortable again. “At that point, two bodies had been processed into the system, and so it had no issues processing two bodies out.”

“Even if they weren’t the same ones?”

“Precisely.”

Alan rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “I thought - Kevin told me about ‘getting in’ the first time, but I thought it was all metaphorical, a description of that state all good hackers get into when the code just flows.”

Quorra took a step backwards. “For us, that’s where miracles come from.” She paused. “Although, for most of my life, he was in the system with us.”

“Speaking of miracles, we kind of need one,” Sam broke in. “There are only so many memory locations that directly connect to the laser array, but it looks like fully half of them have been unusually active since our little digitization disaster.”

Finally, Quorra smiled. “That’s what I’m here for.”

Sam grinned back. “So, what? You remember some of Dad’s mojo that you can use to track them?”

“I don’t need your father’s powers,” she chided, still smiling. “I can go in after them.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Sam protested, “we’re not firing up the laser again.”

“I don’t need it.” She trailed her fingers across the desk; the image wobbled slightly. “It’s my native realm. I can go back whenever I wish.”

“Didn’t we just say the laser array had to construct you a body out of the energy it stored from Kevin’s?” Alan asked, his voice higher than usual.

“Yes,” she admitted, “but I am fairly sure I can control it myself - I remember what it felt like, and I think I can undo it.”

“And if you can’t?” Alan and Sam said together, nearly shouting.

“Then you feed some cardboard boxes to the laser and it builds me a new one on my way back,” she shrugged.

“Even if we thought that was safe,” Sam argued, “ENCOM’s is an open system. You’ve only ever been in Dad’s closed one; this one’s a thousand times bigger, easily, with tens of thousands of Users, not just one. You’ll get lost.”

“I specialize in getting lost and getting found again,” she chuckled. “And you just showed me the node map. I’ll be fine; besides, if Tron could make the transition from this system to the closed one, I can make it going the other way.”

“TRON?” Alan asked. “My old security program?”

“Yup,” Sam agreed, “He caused us some trouble in there, but then he also saved our butts on the way out.”

“It did? I mean - he did?” Alan was looking more bewildered by the second. “I mean, he was part of Kevin’s story, he made a direct assault on the MCP while Flynn went in from another direction, but I didn’t -” He fell silent for a moment. “You know, your dad used to call me Tron when he was joking around.”

Sam grinned weakly and shrugged. “I guess he felt he was working with you on both sides of the screen.” He cleared his throat. “When he told me the story - Tron was his biggest ally in there, until the bad guys caught him and corrupted him.”

“Until Clu took him, he was a great friend to the isos,” Quorra added. “He defended us from the programs who would have erased us when Flynn could not be there.”

“I still have an old back-up somewhere,” Alan mused, “but I don’t think I have a device that could read it.”

Sam dug in one pocket and held up his flash drive. “This is about all that was left of Dad’s system. Tron’s code is about a tenth of it.” He quirked his mouth. “Wanna see your old boy again?”

\---

“Don’t look now,” Fargo mumbled through clenched teeth, “but I think we’re being followed.”

Zane looked up from the control panel of the beam-sailer and snuck a glance over his shoulder. Sure enough, there were a pair of gliders behind them, following tracks parallel to the beam. The edges of the delta-wings were traced in that same bright red.

“I told you not to look,” Fargo whined. “Now they know we know they’re there.”

“Maybe they’re just drafting off of us.”

“What are you talking about? There’s no real air in here, or at least no real air resistance,” Fargo said peevishly. “There’s no real inertia in here, either. It’s like fun-house physics.”

“It’s whatever the rules of the system are,” Zane corrected. “Which we’re interpreting as physical laws, because that’s what we’re used to outside. There’s really no reason this should be comprehensible to us at all.”

“Except that the system is the product of human minds. It only makes sense that it would have some features we’d recognize as human-like.” Fargo edged in. “They’re about to dive-bomb us.”

“You’re sure you’re not being paranoid?”

A spatter of bolts of red light struck the deck inches from Fargo’s feet; pixels sprayed into the control pod. “I’m pretty sure,” Fargo replied.

“Smartass.” Zane glanced behind; the glider that had fired was now swooping around below them for another pass. “Take the controls; I’ll see if I can persuade these guys to leave us alone.” He reached for his disc as Fargo’s hands took the joystick.

The second one fired; Zane dove and knocked the shots off into the void with the back of his own disc, then threw. “Aw, nuts,” he growled as the glider swooped upwards, “even without air resistance the disc isn’t fast enough at this range.”

“So shoot back,” Fargo snapped. “Doesn’t this thing go any faster?”

“It goes as fast as the wave propagation along the beam,” Zane explained. “How am I supposed to shoot them?”

“How are they shooting at us?”

Zane scowled, then watched the first glider drift back into formation. “Oh, crud. The gliders are their discs?”

“They have the concentric markings, anyway,” Fargo agreed.

“Hmm.” Zane inspected his disc carefully, then began tugging at the edges. “Let me think. How did the code for the BFG go again?”

“Think faster,” Fargo yelped, “here they come again?”

“Got it!” The disc in Zane’s hands became a pool of putty, then a mock-up of a high-tech machine gun. “Let’s see if this works.” He hoisted it to his shoulder, and pulled the trigger; a hail of pellets of blue-white light sprayed out, far below their target. “Whoops, I forgot - no inertia, so no kick.” He tried it again just as the gliders converged on the sailer; one of them peeled off, dodging, but he took off a wingtip on the other.

“Must go faster,” Fargo muttered, hands racing across the console.

“We’re only halfway to the tower she sent us to,” Zane grumbled.

Fargo pointed off to their left. “There’s a closer one.”

“But this beam doesn’t go there!” Zane fired again. “Man, those glider things are maneuverable.”

“No inertia,” Fargo said, his eyes glazing momentarily.

“And no air resistance. What’s holding them up?” Zane jumped as another blaster bolt hit the deck. “Damn, they just don’t move like they’re supposed to!”

“Hold on a sec.” Fargo held out both hands, palms down; the sailer shuddered.

Zane shifted to the edge of the sailer’s main platform. “What are you doing?”

“If they can fly, so can we.” Fargo’s eyebrows drew together and he squeezed his eyes shut. “I’ve written enough flight sims.”

The gliders swooped in towards the sailer’s tail - and suddenly there was nothing there but the databeam. The one with the damaged wing clipped the beam and dropped below it, rapidly losing altitude.

The sailer, on the other hand, was rising. “I don’t know what you’re doing, Fargo,” Zane shouted, “but keep doing it!”

Fargo forced himself to open his eyes. “We’re getting to that other tower as quickly as possible,” he gasped; the sailer picked up speed.

Zane got off another shot. “Okay, he’s not gaining on us anymore, but he’s maintaining position. And I can’t get a bead on him.” He risked a glance down into the jagged terrain below. “Looks like the other one’s out of commission, though.”

“Hold on.” Fargo planted his hands flat on the console; the sailer’s gossamer wings rippled, then shifted backwards into something much more streamlined. The vehicle picked up speed again, then dipped sharply to the right.

“Shake him, c’mon, you can do it, Fargo!” Zane cheered.

“Working on it,” Fargo gasped.

The red glider curled around and fired once more; Zane shot back, sweeping the blaster back and forth. “I think I winged him,” he reported, as the glider fell back.

Fargo only groaned. The sailer shimmied like a fish and then darted forward; Zane had time to realize that if there were real air here, it would be roaring past both ears loudly enough to deafen him - and then it came to a stop, just as suddenly. The smaller transport hub loomed over them, a needle against the always-dark sky.

Fargo stumbled from the controls. “We made it, right?” he mumbled.

Zane caught him by the waist and carefully climbed over the edge. “Yeah, we made it,” he assured Fargo, as several programs edged away. “We attracted a little attention, though.” The reshaped glider’s nose poked through the side door.

“Weren’t really meant to go off-beam,” Fargo said thickly. “They’ll probably have to hoist it back into one.” He straightened up. “Where are we?”

Zane glanced at the walls of the atrium. “Hey,” he grinned, “look at that.” A stylized symbol on the wall showed a circle flanked by two narrow rectangles. “What does that look like to you?”

Fargo blinked. “A TIE fighter.”

“Hello, Earth to Fargo, this isn’t Star Wars!” Zane sniffed. “We’re in the satellite section! Maybe we can sneak into some secret stuff for Mansfield after all.”

“The general already knows about the satellite stuff; that’s why we’re here in the first place.” Fargo sat down on what might have been either a small bench or a low table. “And we’ve definitely got a lead on the AI issue.” He inhaled deeply, and continued, “I think we need to catch our next stalker and, uh, interrogate him. I suspect they’re related to the hacker we were hired to catch.”

“If there’s no real air here,” Zane asked idly, “why do we have to breathe to talk?”

“I have no idea,” Fargo sighed. “Force of habit, maybe? I think I still have a pulse, too. And it’s racing.” He surveyed the atrium. “You’re better at sneaky stuff than I am. How do we set up an ambush?”

\---

Alan unplugged the laptop from the wall. “So - we don’t need to go back to Lo-, I mean, to the laser lab?”

“I don’t.” Quorra’s eyebrows rose, then fell again as she inspected the desk. “At least, assuming there’s an appropriate input device on this machine.” She smiled over her shoulder at Sam. “Go ahead and load Tron into the system.”

“Sure thing.” Sam felt under the glass desktop for something. “Where should I send him to?”

She blinked at him. “Oh. Well, you identified several locations where they might be, yes?”

“Half a dozen.” Sam traced a pathway along the screen. “Should I just pick one at random?”

“Choose the one with the most recent activity. I doubt they’re sitting still and waiting for a rescue,” she suggested.

Alan thought about that. “Dr. Fargo might, but yeah, even if he’s sitting tight, that Donovan guy is going to be scouting around.”

“I’m not even sure about Dr. Fargo,” Sam added. “I mean, he’s the one who yanked the cover off the laser array.”

“Wish he hadn’t,” grumbled Alan. “Do you think he was serious about it being a prohibited project?”

“Did you ever report it to anyone outside of ENCOM?” Sam found what he was looking for, and reached for his flash drive.

“Heck, no!” Alan grinned despite himself. “As long as Walter was around to shepherd the thing, we didn’t even report it to ENCOM’s internal bean counters. Dillinger made us turn in a report on it, but that was it. Flynn would -” Alan stopped, staring at a memory.

“What did Dad do?” Sam prompted.

“He’d figure out ways to funnel money to the project so they could build a bigger prototype,” he finished. “The one you found in the arcade must be the second one they built, because I know where the first one is, and that’s the third one down there now.”

Sam nodded. “Given that Dr. Fargo works for the government, and we don’t, I think there’s a pretty good chance he’s more up on the law than we are.” He shrugged. “Not that this usually stops me.”

“I’m used to being a renegade, myself,” Quorra added. “Now, shall we get started?”

“Okay.” Sam tapped the screen, then slid the tiny drive into a USB slot beneath the glass. “I’m going to download Tron directly into the storage server for the satellite laser project; that’s showing some current activity and at least was the right laser bay.”

Quorra said nothing, her eyes fixed on the flash drive. As the tiny LED began to flash, she snaked a hand past Sam’s. “I’ll see you soon, I promise,” she whispered, and laid the tips of her fingers against the metal USB plug.

It was much faster than the laser; she flashed, like an image on the screen, and was gone. Her clothes fluttered to the floor, suddenly empty.

Alan fell out of his chair. “What - where did -”

Sam kicked back and grinned. “Told you.”

Picking himself up, Alan came around the desk, as if he expected to find her playing hide-and-seek in the cubbyhole underneath. “Where did she go?”

Sam pointed at the screen. “Look at the directory of active programs.”

Alan leaned in. “It’s TRON! Wow, it’s been a long time since I saw that name on this desk.” He squinted and adjusted his glasses. “And - it lists Quorra as a program, too. Quorra.iso.”

“And since she’s the only program in the system with that extension,” Sam said, smiling, “she should be easy to track.”

\---

He was staring at the beams that crisscrossed above them, shades from lemon through gold to deep tangerine, with his helmet tucked under his arm. He looked almost exactly as she remembered him, before the change.

“Hello, Tron,” Quorra said softly. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

He glanced over at her, taking her measure in a single look, then looked up again. “You have me at a disadvantage.”

“My name’s Quorra,” she introduced herself. “I’m a . . . friend of Flynn’s.”

At that, he closed his eyes; his hand gripped the helmet so tightly she wondered how it managed not to crack. “I’m glad he had a friend, then.”

She frowned, and reached out for him. “Don’t blame yourself for Clu’s treachery.”

“I don’t.” He turned and gazed at her outstretched hand. “I blame myself for not remembering.” He shuddered. “I still don’t know if I have any corrupted instructions left. Do you think it’s safe to be with me, even now?”

“Even here?” She gestured around them. “Clu never lived in this system.”

“Not that one, no.” Tron shrugged. “There were versions before the one you knew, the one that hunted you.” He reached across himself to hold his left arm, as if he were trying to steady it. “So - we’re not in Flynn’s system anymore. This feels like - the one before.”

Quorra nodded, her hair swishing with the exertion. “Yes. The ENCOM system. The Son of Flynn has brought you home.”

“It hasn’t been home for a long time,” Tron said, shaking his head. “I barely recognize it.”

“Well, I’ve never been here before,” she answered, beginning to get impatient. “So you’ll have to help me.”

“Help you do what?” He looked at her again; his eyes softened, and for the first time, she realized, he wasn’t assessing her as a threat.

“There are two Users lost in the system,” she explained, “and no one has more experience helping lost Users than you.”

“That was an accident, when Flynn was actually lost,” he corrected, but he was starting to - not smile, exactly, but show some hint of amusement. “If you were helping his son, you probably have as much as I do.”

“Stop quibbling and help me find them,” she demanded. Then her face softened. “Please?”

He hung the helmet on his belt and held out his hand. “For the Users, anything.”

\---

“Stop strutting,” Zane hissed. “You’re being obvious.”

Fargo stumbled. “I’m just walking. How am I supposed to walk?”

“Just - be casual.” Zane glanced up at their reflections in the building next to them. “I think it’s working. Someone’s trailing us.”

“So now what?”

Zane re-imagined the plan. “At that T-intersection up there - where the alley goes behind the tower - we split up, one on each side. Get ready to jump when they come through.”

“Okay.” Fargo’s voice quavered. “I’m really not very good at being sneaky.”

“Just don’t move until they come through. They’ll be forced to turn; it’ll slow them down.” Zane’s shoulder twitched; he reminded himself that the disc was there, in case he needed it. “I know a little judo. I think I can take them down; just help me hold them.”

“Okay.” They crossed the intersection and changed directions, hovering on either side of the T.

The footsteps approaching were quiet, and echoed in the canyon between the high walls. Fargo hugged himself, trying not to fidget.

Zane gave the signal as their stalker crossed the threshold; Fargo flung himself out blindly, hoping not to lose his glasses in the struggle. He impacted something unexpectedly soft, and heard Zane cry out “Gotcha - _oof!_ ”

His eyes flew open. “Hey, are you - oh, crap, I’m so sorry, ma’am!” Fargo’s face was pressed into a very feminine shoulder, and her suit was black, like theirs, with highlights in pure white - and quite skintight. Carefully, trying not to lose his balance, he backed up and then straightened his spine. “You, I , uh, we were expecting someone else.”

“Obviously.” She reached out one hand to help Zane off the floor, where she’d kicked him. “So I take it you have already been detected?”

“There’s a guy, uh, program in red who seems to have a mad-on for us,” Zane explained. “We thought you were following us, so we assumed you were him.” He rubbed at a spot on his thighs; that must be where her boot had connected. “Sorry about the misunderstanding.”

“Not entirely misunderstood. I _was_ following you,” she said, glancing up. “As was he. Come meet our new friends, Tron.”

Another program, his circuit-lines a bluer hue than Zane’s, darted into the alleyway. His eyes were huge. “This city - I have no idea where we are,” he said. “There was nothing this big in the system when I was last here, except the mesa for the MCP himself.”

“We’re in one of the 441 memory-assignment nodes for the laser labs,” Fargo stated. “I’m sorry, what did you say your names were?”

“I’m sorry; I really should introduce everyone,” she laughed. “I’m Quorra; this is Tron; and if I’m remembering correctly, you’re Dr. Fargo and You’re Dr. Donovan.”

“That’s right. Call me Zane,” he purred, finally getting a good look at her.

Fargo elbowed him in the ribs. “And did - someone send you?”

“Sam Flynn.” She pointed off to their left. “I’m supposed to guide you back to the lab you cane from, so we can create an exit point.” Eyes shifting, she paused. “You do know how to code an exit point, don’t you?”

Tron stood up straighter. “They’re the Users we were looking for?”

Zane’s head came up. “You’re programs? I thought you said Flynn sent you.”

“He did,” Quorra assured him, “but not from the digitizer. Tron was a program here before Sam was born, although he’s been away for a while. I’m not native here, exactly - but yes, I’m technically a program, too.”

“As are they,” Tron barked, reaching for his disc. “And they don’t look friendly.”

Fargo followed his gaze; a troop of their followers, red on grey, were marching towards them in a loose V-formation. He counted quickly. “Oh, crud. And there are twice as many of them.”

The red in the lead stretched out one finger. “It’s the interlopers we want,” he shouted. “You other two - run, and you won’t get hurt.”

“Not a chance,” Quorra called back; she reached for her disc, her feet changing to a more stable stance.

Tron scowled. “This, on the other hand, I’m quite familiar with.” Raising his voice, he called back, “I’ve fought the likes of you on the game grid a dozen times. Why should I be your coward now?”

The lead red shrugged. “Your de-resolution, program.”

Zane leaned towards Fargo. “He _did_ have back-ups.”

“What?” Fargo adjusted his glasses and peered at their pursuers.

“They’re identical. They’re copies of the same program,” Zane realized aloud, just as the reds charged.

Tron exploded into motion, the disc flying from his hand as he pivoted. Zane grabbed his own; Quorra’s was already in the air. The reds tried to dodge; one thumped into the mirrored wall. By the time he’d recovered, Tron had already taken two of them down, their pixels scattered across the alley. Quorra leapt, catching her own disc and deflecting an entire barrage from the reds as they regrouped.

Fargo squeaked and made himself small behind the corner of the intersection, his own disc clasped to his head as if he were trying to hide under it.

“Dang,” Zane grumbled, finally getting off a shot and watching his target deflect it easily - only to see Tron’s disc fly directly into the same red before he recovered. “That guy’s good.”

Tron vaulted into the middle of the crimson mob. “That he is,” Quorra agreed. “He’s also going to be hard to work around from in there. Work at picking off stragglers; I’ll see if I can -”

Half of the remaining reds pixellated and de-rezzed. Zane allowed himself a short laugh; “Little easier now.”

“Oh, yes,” she agreed, slinging an overhead shot; another red fell. “Cover me.” She darted forward.

A red disc headed straight for her head; Zane did a quick calculation and let fly. His disc and the red one collided in midair; the red one spun uselessly off into a wall as his ricocheted and soared back. Quorra flashed him a grin as she dove into the melee.

And then it was over, Tron standing alone as the last scattered reds vanished in showers of light. He caught his disc as it returned from his last throw, then scanned the street in both directions. “Looks like that’s the last of them.” He frowned. “There was something very familiar about their fighting style.”

“I didn’t really get a good feel for it,” Zane confessed. “It was over too quickly.” Quorra nodded silently.

Fargo unfolded from his crouch. “It was almost like they couldn’t all move at once,” he suggested. “One would make a move, and then another would react to it -but very, very quickly.”

Zane pursed his lips briefly, thinking. “Yeah. Sort of the same with the gliders - they’d move in formation, then one would dive and then the other - they never both attacked at once.”

“That, too,” Tron agreed, “but there was something else.” He replaced his disc. “We should start moving. If we stay here, there’ll be another squad of them down on us any minute.”

“There’s a transport tower that way,” Fargo said, pointing, “but that’s where we came from.”

Tron followed one of the beams above them. “So there must be another one over there, too.”

“Sounds as good as any other option,” Quorra agreed. She started to replace her own disc, then froze, her eyes following the circles as if there were something chilling written there.

Fargo paused. “Something wrong?”

“N-no,” she denied. “Just - remembering the last time this happened.” Very quickly, she put her disc away and fell into line with the rest. “Me and Tron on the outside, just in case.”

“If you say so.” Fargo glanced at her disc; it didn’t look much different from his or Zane’s. He turned to Tron. “Lead the way.”

\---

“You know,” Alan pointed out, “we already know our hacker has access to the desktop.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “Yeah. So?”

“So, if we have our tiger team, an evolved program who also happens to be a beautiful girl, and an old but effective security program running around the system, do we really want our prankster following them at the same time we do?” Alan asked, patiently.

“Why would he care?” Sam’s brow creased.

“Look, Dr. Fargo didn’t hit the on-switch,” Alan argued. “Someone else activated the digitizing laser.”

“He didn’t?” Sam looked puzzled. “I thought he caught it when he pulled the canvas off.”

“Nope. I checked,” Alan stated. “And you thought our hacker was a program, something - or someone - inside the system.”

“Yeah, but you guys had me convinced it was that Dillinger kid again.” Sam rubbed at his temples, then asked, “So, you think our two issues here - the hacker and the laser array - are really just one?”

Alan shrugged. “It’s kind of difficult to apply Occam’s razor here. None of the possibilities on the table are particularly simple. But if he can get into the laptop undetectably by the wireless network, he could probably get into the laser array through the regular network.”

“So - how do we rig a computer to the network so we can trace Quorra, but our hacker can’t read it?” Sam griped. “And yeah, I don’t think Dil Junior knows about the digitizer. I didn’t, and if he reads the quarterly reports closer than I do, I’ll be surprised.”

“And it’s not one of his research groups; he’s strictly operating systems at the moment,” Alan agreed. “I don’t know. If we knew that, we wouldn’t have needed the DoD’s help in the first place, remember?”

Sam traced the edge of the screen on the desk with one finger. “No sense staying here, though,you’re right,” he decided. “We know the hacker has access to this machine. How about your datapad?”

“If he could get into the laptop, he can probably get into that, too.” Alan paced back and forth for a moment. “It might take a little longer.”

Sam shut down the tracer; the desk returned to a blank desktop. “Let’s at least find another terminal.”

As he stood up, a single blinking cursor appeared. He scowled. “Yeah, thanks for confirming,” he growled, heading for the door.

> FLYNN, WAIT. DON’T LEAVE. I CAN HELP.

“That’ll be the day,” Sam grumbled, switching off the light on the way out.

\---

“Now, that I recognize,” Tron said, scowling.

The area before them was a huge, perfectly rectangular pit, a box canyon in the most literal sense. Below them, recognizers, tanks, and lightcycles duked it out on small grids and mazes, occasionally ducking from one grid to the next. At two round platforms, one on either end, new vehicles rezzed into existence, and occasionally a barely-visible program would climb out of one vehicle and race across the grid to another.

“This is a game grid,” Quorra realized. “But Clu’s never had this many programs on it.”

“Neither did the MCP’s,” Tron agreed, a hint of shame shadowing his face. “But it looked just like this, only smaller.”

Zane was tracing lines of energy along the walls of the canyon. “This must be the beta area for Space Paranoids online,” he said with a grin.

Fargo looked up. “Yeah,” he breathed. “There’s the connection to the T-1 that heads outside the system. I didn’t recognize it without the rest of the I/O tower.” He pointed at the seedlike bulb that hovered overhead, supported by an arched line of glowing pipe from each corner of the game grid below.

Tron and Quorra exchanged a glance. She asked first. “What does ‘online’ mean there? I mean, we can see they’re online; they’re active, right?”

“Ah.” Fargo took the lead. “In this particular case, ‘online’ means ‘on the Internet,’ not just active in the system.”

Tron decided that it was his turn. “What’s the Internet?”

Fargo beamed. “It’ll be easier to show you than tell you.” He turned and walked towards the nearest corner.

Zane chuckled and gestured at the two programs to follow. “C’mon. This should be fun.”

The walk was longer than it looked; Fargo was a bit winded by the time they got there. Still, he was smiling. “Here, put your hand on the pipeline.” He took Tron’s hand and placed it flat against the tube; what had looked delicate from far away was thicker around than he was.

Quorra hesitated. Zane gently took her wrist. “You, too. Don’t you want to see?” He set it on the tube; she hesitated, then relaxed.

Fargo and Zane closed their eyes, drawing an echo of the information rushing through the tube into the two programs. It was startlingly easy, Fargo realized. The information wanted to be read.

And Quorra and Tron were falling upwards, into the seed-node above them, with a hundred thousand voices rushing around them.

 _Voices of the Users!_ Tron thought, or said - in here it didn’t really matter.

 _So many,_ Quorra replied. _So many, making so many changes._

And then they were in the node, looking upwards, and -

 _Other systems, thousands of them, each with their own User, sometimes two or dozens or hundreds, all sensing signals to this one, and this system sending signals back, and to each other, and_

 _it_

 _was_

 _all_

 _so_

 _huge -_

Tron stiffened and shouted wordlessly; Fargo broke the contact and let him go. Quorra sagged, her body half-limp; Zane caught and held her, puzzled.

Slowly, she murmured, “The world is - are there any boundaries at all?”

“Yeah,” Zane said, still confused. “Atmosphere, or really Near Earth Orbit at this point. We’ve been further out once, but -”

Fargo shook his head. “For them, much farther. Where are Voyager and Pioneer now? Are you going to tell me there aren’t programs like them on those?”

“Depends on whether they’re out of power yet.” Zane snapped his mouth shut. “Oh, crap. Oh, _man_.” He looked at the program in his arms. “They weren’t unmanned after all, were they?”

“We didn’t know.” Fargo shook Tron gently. “Hey, you okay?”

“So many -” Tron shook himself. “I apologize. I think I may have gone into processor overload.”

“It’s easy to do, when you first see it,” Quorra said, her words almost crawling. “It happened to me when I saw their world for the first time.”

“Their world?” Tron staggered. “The Users’ world?” He blinked, his eyes dimming and then brightening again. “You used your User powers,” he breathed. “It’s been so long since -”

“Anyone other than Flynn,” Quorra agreed. “They feel - different. Sam didn’t use his much.”

Fargo and Zane exchanged a look. “Sorry,” Zane offered.

“Don’t be,” Tron said. “I - I think I needed to see that.” His hands went to his head. “I knew Flynn’s system was smaller, but -”

“And Clu knew it, too,” Quorra continued. “Maybe that was one of the reasons he wanted to leave - Flynn wouldn’t expand his world.”

“If it was hardware-dependent,” Fargo offered cautiously, “it’s possible he couldn’t.”

“I don’t know,” Quorra sighed. “Sam would know, though. And we need to get you back to him.” She looked up at the glimmering node again, then scanned the horizon. “Well, we can’t use that as an exit. And the next I/O tower is a long walk. Do you think coming up on the one you used last from a different direction would throw off your stalkers?”

“Possibly,” Fargo said, at the same time as Zane raised his eyebrows and answered, “Only one way to find out.”

\---

“How did you manage to get your office into such a mess? You’ve only been back for a week,” Alan marveled. Stacks of books three feet high tottered on top of filing cabinets with their drawers jammed half-open; coffee cups decorated with cartoon characters warred for desk space with comb-bound manuals and binder clips.

Roy gave him a sour look, then shrugged. “Most of this has been packed up in boxes for the past fifteen years or so. I’m not even finished unpacking. It’ll look better once I’ve had time to organize it.”

Sam flipped through a stack of old fanfold printer paper, the tracking-wheel holes still attached on the sides. It appeared to be mostly ASCII art of cows. “So, anyway, do you have any ideas on how to track Quorra without tipping off our prankster?”

Kicking back in his office chair, Roy gave him another shrug. “Well, whatever you search for, if the hacker can see your search terms, he can replicate them. So tracking her by her file extension is right out.” He rearranged a pile of CD-ROMS on a side shelf. “Is there something else we can look for? Something in her code?” He glared at Alan again. “I can’t believe you had evidence that Flynn’s old story was literally true and you didn’t come get me.”

“I was floored at the time,” Alan offered in explanation. “And I haven’t seen her uncompiled code -”

“I’ve sen part of it, when Dad was fixing her up,” Sam said. “I don’t know how much of it I could remember now, though.” He shook his head, and turned back to Roy. “She’s an isomorphic algorithm.”

“Isomorphic to what?”

“Um, I don’t know.” Sam narrowed his eyes. “Just - isomorphic.”

“You can’t be just isomorphic, any more than you can be just similar,” Roy argued.

Alan bit at his lower lip. “So if Flynn called them that, what would he have assumed for the object?”

“Other programs?” Sam offered.

“Not distinctive enough,” Roy said dismissively. “Unless he had a specific type of program in mind.”

“Or unless they mimic the closest type of program stored in memory,” suggested Alan. “In either of those cases, there would be an echo-effect. Maybe we could search for that?”

“Whatever it is, we’ll also need some way to mask it from our hacker-or-hostile-program,” Sam declared.

Roy was already typing on his own laptop. “Hey,” he said, gesturing them over, “I got a hit.”

“And it’s close to the last place we saw her,” Alan reported. “You know, if we need to, we could switch to searching for TRON - I know his code well enough to search for some of the tricks I used.”

“We don’t know for sure that they haven’t split up,” Sam pointed out. “Let’s save that for emergencies - Quorra knows what they look like, at least.”

“And you looked the same, in there? You and Kev, both?” Roy’s face lit up with curiosity.

“Yup. And Quorra looks the same out here, only with more color.” Sam reached for the laptop. “Hey, if we move from wireless access point to access point, that makes _us_ less traceable, right?”

Roy and Alan looked at each other nervously. “Um, yeah,” Roy answered.

“Then let’s go! No sense waiting here for him to find us.” Sam scooped up the laptop and set off down the hallway at a jog; the two older programmers scrambled to follow.

\---

“It’s just one of them,” Tron protested. “We can take him easily.”

“He could be a lure,” argued Quorra. “We’d be walking into a trap.”

“I’m less concerned with that, given that he’s not immediately attacking us, than I am with the fact that he’s tracked us through three backtracks and a circle at this point,” Fargo said, stepping between them. “I just want to lose him before we get back to the city.”

Zane said nothing; he turned to the irregular spire next to them and started climbing.

Quorra frowned up at him, then turned back to Fargo. “He’ll see him for sure up there.”

“He can see us already,” Fargo insisted.

Tron plucked his disc from its resting space and began tossing it; the gesture would have looked idle if it weren’t so clearly practiced.

Zane slid down the spire, clutching it between his knees. “There’s some kind of structure off to our left,” he reported. “I can’t tell what it is, but it looks like it’s mostly underground, with a domed roof poking up.”

Tron’s head came up. “Round or squared off?”

“Squared at the corners, rounded in the middle.” Zane traced the shape in midair with his hands. “I think there was an entrance on the side perpendicular to the way we’ve been going.”

“That sounds like an old file array,” Tron mused. “At least, that’s what they looked like when I was last in this system.”

“It’s better than being out in the open where they can pick us off.” Quorra started walking in the directions Zane had pointed. “Especially if they have more of the gliders you described.”

They came around the corner of the canyon wall they’d been following. Their pursuer was visible in the distance, standing on a low rise. “Quickly, then,” Quorra ordered, taking off at a steady jog towards what looked like a softly rounded blue hill.

The sides didn’t become visible until they were almost on top of it. “It’s half-buried by the - whatever this is,” panted Fargo, kicking at the crumbly surface they’d just run over. “Do you think it’s safe?”

“No, but it’s probably safer than not having cover.” Tron scanned the terrain. “He saw us head this way, but he can’t see the door from here.”

“Then let’s get in before he realizes we haven’t just gone around!” Quorra shook her head in frustration. “How do you make decisions when I’m not here?”

Tron glanced down and away, silent, his face blank.

Zane wrinkled his nose. “Looks like you hit a nerve, there,” he murmured. His fingers found the edge of the door and tugged. “Hmm. Locked.”

Fargo grinned. “Too hard for you?”

“Not even.” Zane pressed one hand flat against the space where a lock would have been and concentrated. A pulse of light glowed and faded; the door slid upwards.

Quorra turned away for a moment, then stepped closer to Tron. “I’m sorry. I forgot.”

Tron started off into the distance. “It’s been a long time since I made many decisions for myself.”

She nodded. “Clu.”

“And Flynn, before that.” He stretched his shoulders before looking back at her. “With the Users here, I feel like I should defer to them. You don’t?”

“Not for them. Not even with Sam. Only Flynn.” She glanced over at her charges. “And we should probably not be letting them go in first.”

By the time the two programs had ducked through the door, Zane had already scoured the entryway for information. “It’s got a file directory,” he explained to them, “and it’s still active - there are records in here dating all the way from 1982 to the present.”

“That would explain why it’s under a gridline,” Fargo added. “It’s not a big exchanger of information, but packets would get dropped off and sent.”

“But is there another exit?” Quorra asked. “I’d rather face a siege than an open ambush, but it would be nice if we can get out of here, too.”

“I can’t tell from here,” Zane admitted, “but we can scout out the place pretty easily - it has a really simple floorplan. There are two main aisles that cross at the center, and smaller aisles at right angles and regular intervals.”

Tron nodded and stepped around the directory display. The others followed, huddling in a tight group as they made their way down the main aisle towards a low, triangular pylon at the main intersection.

“This is as big as two football fields,” Zane marveled.

Fargo sniffed. “You didn’t figure that out from the outside?”

The pylon in the center of the room began to turn. Zane jumped, and reached for his disc; Quorra dropped to a crouch and did the same.

Tron held out one hand. “Wait. That’s an enclosure - it allows a program direct access to data for processing.”

Fargo gulped. “Someone’s _in_ there?”

“Yes, someone is,” said a peevish voice, “and not only are you trespassing, you’re interrupting my work.” The pylon finished its rotation; an oval opening contained a face, long-featured and tired-looking.

Tron blinked. “You sound familiar.”

The other program’s brow wrinkled. “So do you - but you can’t be who I’m thinking of.” He peered at Tron, then the others. “He left the system a long, long time ago.”

Tron’s face tightened in astonishment. “Ram?”

“Yes! Tron, is that you?” The front surface of the pylon vanished, and a program in grey and blue clambered out, nearly tripping over his own feet. “You pixel-pusher! You and Flynn left me all alone in this eight-bit system!” He rushed forward.

“Is he dangerous?” Zane whispered.

The other program collided with Tron; for a moment, they looked as if they were wrestling - then it became obvious that they were locked in a bear-hug. Ram pounded him on the back. “Where have you been?” he shouted.

“We - didn’t mean to be away so long,” Tron explained. “Flynn was building a system of his own - but we thought we’d come back, once he’d learned all he could from it.”

“He never mentioned that,” Quorra murmured to herself.

Ram finally let go of Tron, only to grab him by the shoulders again. “So what happened? Where’s Flynn?” He stared at each of the others in turn, as if they might turn out to be Flynn in disguise.

“He - never made it out. He wrote a program to be almost as powerful as a User, and he turned on him.” Tron swallowed and looked away; Quorra bit her tongue.

“Oh, no.” Ram stepped back, squeezing his eyes shut. “Then again - you guys thought I was de-rezzed for good, and my User sent me back.”

Fargo chuckled, “Always keep good backups,” under his breath.

“But it’s different -” Tron started, then turned around. “ _Is_ it different up there? Or are there - do Users have Users?”

Zane and Fargo exchanged a panicked glance. “Uh, well -” Fargo started, just as Zane began, “That’s a really complicated question.”

Ram’s eyes widened. “Are these Users, too?”

“They are,” Quorra said, indicating the Eurekans. “I’m - a program from Flynn’s system.”

“Not the one that crashed it,” Ram said; it wasn’t a question, but Tron and Quorra both shook their heads, hard. Ram sighed. “I spend megacycles running actuarial tables with no visitors, and then I get an old, old friend, a program whose User tried to save me, and two new Users, all at once. Well, welcome! What brings you here?”

“We’re being stalked by a program that looks like one of the MCP’s old drones, or, to be more accurate, several of the MCP’s old drones,” Tron explained. “We didn’t actually know you were here, although if I _had_ known I would have gotten here faster.”

“Oh, them.” Ram looked vaguely disgusted. “Have you realized which one yet?”

“Which one?” Tron looked confused for a second, then nodded slowly. “Not the face, but the fighting style - it’s like Sark’s, but they’re not nearly as good as he was.”

“They’re all copies of the same program,” Ram stated.

Zane agreed, “We figured that out already.”

“Oh, good.” Ram inspected Zane and Fargo a little more closely. “Did you hear the story of how Flynn got here the first time?”

“Not really.”

“Well, we can explain later. The point is, there was a bad guy named Sark, and his User was hassling Flynn up there as well. The red programs you’re describing -” He closed his eyes and rested one hand on his enclosure. “There’s one on top of the array right now.”

“That’s the one we came in here to get away from,” Quorra said.

Ram nodded again. “They started showing up a few kilocycles ago. I guess their User did to Sark what mine did for me - but these don’t remember much of anything, and there are a lot of them.”

“Earlier backups?” Zane asked; Fargo counted something on his fingers and agreed.

“Like, really early. Maybe before he was the MCP’s second in command, even. But these are copies of copies - they’re starting to get bit rot. And I think the copies are being made in-system, not loaded from external storage.” Ram looked at the ceiling, as if he could see through it to the red program above it. “Find the original, and you might be able to stop the copies.”

“Especially if the original is closer to Sark.” Tron looked grim. “Thanks, old friend.”

“I don’t guess I can ask you to stay,” Ram said; again, it wasn’t really a question.

Quorra was the one to answer. “No, we have to get these Users home.”

Ram smiled sadly. “There’s an underground exit under the enclosure here; the tunnel leads directly to the closest system node. Usually it’s just used for slow bulk data transport, but it’s big enough you won’t have to crawl.”

“Thanks, old friend.” Tron clasped Ram’s shoulder, once. “It won’t be so long until next time. I promise.”

“It had better not be.” Ram returned the gesture. “I love my job, I do, but it gets really boring.”

Quorra slithered into the enclosure. “Down here?” Ram nodded. She ducked down, then disappeared. A moment later her head popped up. “It’s clear, guys. Follow me.”

“Thanks,” Fargo murmured to Ram as they slipped down into the tunnel.

“Any time, for a User,” Ram replied dreamily.

\---

The soft patter of footsteps rang down the stairwell as Sam jogged past the 15th floor. “I didn’t know the insurance department’s server was in the same rack as the basement’s,” he commented as he re-balanced the laptop in the crook of his elbow.

Roy made the turn halfway between floors 14 and 15, groaning. “Yeah, Human Resources has some interesting legacy code. That whole server group has been through five or six upgrades together.”

Alan paused to pull off his jacket. “Hold up, Sam,” he panted, “I think we need a minute.”

Sam jogged in place on the landing. “Guys, the whole point of this is not to stay with any particular wi-fi node for long.”

Grinning weakly, Alan tossed his head upwards. “And it’s a good idea. It’s just that at our age, downstairs is a lot easier than upstairs.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Tell you what, when we get to the twenty-second floor, we’ll cut over and use the elevator the rest of the way.”

“ ‘Let me know when we get to twenty,’ ” Roy quoted.

Alan flinched. “Don’t you dare.”

\---

Quorra and Fargo pressed themselves flat against the inside wall of the I/O tower and edged crabwise out of the stairwell. Scanning the level, Quorra held a finger to her lips and pointed at a solar sailer docked at the end of a shimmering tangerine beam. Fargo followed her finger, then shook his head firmly; he waved in the direction of a larger transport, a barge with a pair of triangular sails on each side, straddling a beam of bright goldenrod.

Shrugging, Quorra edged towards the second transport, Fargo following behind her. The thin crowd of programs on the platform studiously ignored them both. A bored-looking subroutine in a white jacket with golden piping stepped away from the barge towards a recharge station.

Immediately, a program in red tore away from the rest of the crowd, racing towards them. Its disc pulsed, elongated, and became a spear; a second red appeared out of the stairwell across from them and charged, doing the same. Fargo squeaked and dove behind Quorra, who dropped easily into her ready stance.

A pair of disks flew over their heads, one from each of the side stairwells; the reds broke stride and dodged, taken by surprise. The crowd split and fled, stampeding for the exits, as Tron and Zane leaped out and headed for their compatriots. Another pair of reds struggled past the fleeing innocents, far in the rear now.

Fargo watched as Quorra, Tron, and Zane began a bewildering barrage of disc throws and athletic leaps; he was sure that at one point Zane had thrown Tron’s disk into one of their attackers instead of his own. No matter, as long as it worked; his job was to hijack a transport. It looked like the reds were down by two, now, anyway. He ran his fingers across the transport control panel; it lit up, lime green and ice blue. It took only a couple of seconds to deploy the sails. He looked back up to see how the fight was going -

Right into the face of a red soldier. His face was grey and drawn, with narrow features and a prominent nose, and he was holding a spear pointed at Fargo’s throat.

Fargo swallowed and raised his hands. “Uh, you got me?”

“Not for long.” The red took a step forward, the spearpoint grazing Fargo’s chin. “You’re an impurity in the system. You must be erased.”

“Impurity?” Fargo backed up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We, I mean, not us specifically but people like us, created the system in the first place.”

“Exactly.” The red followed him, step for step. “Imagine what a system by programs, for programs would look like.”

“Kind of repetitive, I’d guess,” Fargo suggested.

Instead of answering, the red roared and jabbed. Fargo wheeled to the side; the spear got him square in the left shoulder instead of the neck. His eyes watering with the pain, Fargo grabbed for his own disc, and managed to get it between himself and the next thrust. The spear bounced, as if it had hit a shield.

The red looked surprised. “You’re no game warrior. How are you doing that?”

“I’ve played enough videogames in my time.” Fargo warded off another thrust, clutching his disc in both hands.

A blur of blue and white sailed past the red’s spear arm and slammed into the side of his chest. “Last one down!” Tron called, as the pixels bounced harmlessly off of Fargo’s disc.

Zane groaned from somewhere out on the floor, “I think they’re getting tougher. Quorra, you all right?”

“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” she hissed through clenched teeth.

The red in front of Fargo slumped and began to pixellate. Fargo jumped up from his half-crouch. “Oh, no you don’t,” he growled. “Tron, come help me hold this guy!”

“He’s de-rezzing; he won’t be a problem for much long-” Tron didn’t finish the sentence. Fargo planted one hand firmly on the red’s forehead and the other just below the wound; as he closed his eyes, his hands began to glow pale, pale green. Scattered pixels jumped back to their places; blocks became dots, and dots resolved back into flesh. The red twitched, stared horrified up at Fargo, and passed out, going limp under his hands.

Tron flexed his fingers. “If Users can do that,” he asked, very softly, “why did Flynn let Ram de-rez the first time?”

“He might not have known he could yet,” Fargo offered, standing up. “Now, I really, really need you to secure him, because if he wakes up he’s going to try and kill me again.”

The whisper drifted from the left-hand stairwell. “A User!”

“Oh, great,” Zane groaned, helping Quorra onto the barge. “We’ve got company.”

“The Users are among us!” The crowd that had fled the battle now suddenly surged onto the platform, a mob of programs headed towards them. “A User walks among programs!” “Hail the Users!”

“They’ll swarm us,” Quorra realized aloud. “Fargo, get us out of here!”

Fargo tore his eyes away from the adoring crowd threatening to swamp the transport. “Huh? Oh, yeah, sure.” He stepped back around the console and traced a pair of sliders; the barge eased away from the dock.

The crowd stopped at the edge as the transport pulled away. “User,” they cried, “give us a sign!”

Zane turned towards the back of the boat. “A sign, huh?” He raised his disc, then threw it; it danced in the air over him, a trail of light and sparks in its wake. The crowd burst into cheers, waving their own discs, collapsing in each others’ arms, even crying.

Fargo looked back over his shoulder. “A winking smiley? Really?”

“You try coming up with a good omen on short notice.” Zane caught his disc and leaned over the red. “Wow, you totally put him back together, and you’re not even tired out.”

“Reprogramming on the fly isn’t that tough,” Fargo noted. “It’s moving stuff around that’s hard.”

“Can you fix your arm the same way?” Tron looked concerned.

“No.” Fargo winced. “But it looks worse than it is. He mostly got my clothes.” He looked down, then tugged the overtunic off. “It’s got enough blood on it already,” he muttered, trying to wad it around the spear-cut with his right hand and run the barge with his left.

Quorra favored Zane with a coy smile. “Since he’s busy with the transport,” she asked, “maybe you could help me where they got my foot?”

“I’ll give it a shot,” Zane smirked.

\---

Tron crouched in front of the red, his lolling head in his hands. “I’m going to ask you one more time. Who sent you?”

“I sent me,” the red replied. His unfocused eyes drifted.

Zane leaned over. “But _why_ did you send you?”

“To find you.” The red wobbled slightly in place.

Tron’s hands dropped to the red’s shoulders; he shook him, tightly, once. “What do you want with us?”

“To take you back to me.”

Straightening, Zane glanced over to the console. “This isn’t going anywhere,” he complained in Fargo’s direction.

“Sark, your name is Sark,” Tron hissed. “Remember!”

“No,” the red mumbled. “Just . . . me.”

Fargo laid one hand across the console. “Do you think he genuinely doesn’t know?” His shoulder was bandaged with the remains of his tunic; he’d had to tear off two strips to tie it in place.

“He’s in an infinite loop,” Zane guessed. “Short-circuited. GOTO’ed.” He walked around the post they’d lashed the red to.

“Kind of like some of these transport beams,” Fargo muttered, turning back to the console. “Well, can you fix it?”

“Don’t know.” Zane’s eyes traced the circuit patterns on the red program’s armor. “Hey, didn’t the clothes hut say everything we learned got recorded on these?” He knelt, and picked up the red’s disc from the floor next to Quorra’s feet.

“Yes. They’re our memory access,” Quorra explained. “If we are ever interrupted, as long as we have the discs, we still have our identity.”

“Interrupted?” Zane’s eyebrows arched.

“Power cycles,” Fargo called over his shoulder. “Permanent storage instead of random-access memory.”

One eyebrow lowered. “Well, in that case . . .” Zane held the crimson-ringed disc vertically out in front of him and stared at it. An image appeared between him and the disc; he rotated it and peered at the cascade of shapes. “Huh. Okay, give me a minute,” he murmured, as a hollow silhouette of the red’s cranium came into focus.

Tron stared, wide-eyed and uneasy. “What are you doing?”

Quorra shifted position to stand between Zane and Tron. “He’s reading the disc. Didn’t Flynn ever do that while you were around?”

“Not that I saw.” Tron watched as Zane sifted through symbols with his fingers. “Clu, I think - but I, I wasn’t -”

“You weren’t yourself,” Quorra assured him. “And I don’t think Clu could write as well as read.”

“No.” Tron jumped as the red twitched slightly. “Is he - can he really change the code while it’s still running?”

“I can, yeah,” Zane interrupted. “That’s how I fixed Quorra’s foot earlier.” He poked at a string of numbers. “But I’m really just reading through this guy. He genuinely doesn’t know what his name is - there’s a corrupted instruction there.”

“Sark,” Tron said again. “I have a long history with him. But this must be a very early revision.”

Zane shrugged. “He’s also sort of lying about taking us somewhere. Someone that he identifies as himself does want us taken back to a location, but his mission was to kill us.” He flipped the disc; the images flickered and disappeared. “He doesn’t seem to realize that those are contradictory, so maybe ‘lying’ is too strong a word. That might also be where the loop comes from.”

“So where does the other him want us to be?” Fargo asked.

Zane stepped over to the console. “Give me a node map?” Fargo made two passes and one appeared. Zane studied it for a few seconds. “Somewhere in there,” he said, pointing as a spot several nodes away, in a triangular space between three nodes.

“Then that’s where we’re going,” Fargo stated flatly. “I’m guessing that’s the guy who zapped us in here in the first place, and I’d kind of like to know why.”

“And I’d bet he’s either the problem we were sent here to fix, or he can tell us who is,” Zane agreed.

“Good,” Fargo said, and flung his arms out to either side. The transport _blinked_ -

Tron leaped to his feet; Quorra gasped and stumbled. “What just happened?” Tron demanded.

Fargo gestured at the map. “There’s no real reason why information has to travel at processor-speed around the network if it’s not being encoded or decoded. ENCOM is completely outfitted with fiber-optic cable. I just took us from there -” he pointed at a line between two nodes - “to there at the actual speed of the cable, by direct-addressing.”

“Lightspeed travel,” Zane said approvingly.

Tron stared off of the barge’s deck; they were approaching a nearly abandoned node tower. The few programs there were gaping at them as they neared the landing. “You can’t just keep using this much User power,” he protested. “With Flynn, it was one thing - he was making an entire new system. This is - well, it’ll be like a beacon to the Sarks, for one thing.”

“Great,” Zane replied. “We’ll draw them out.”

“I think Tron’s actually worried about disrupting the normal operations of the system,” Quorra suggested.

“I checked to make sure we wouldn’t interrupt the traffic flow here,” Fargo noted as the transport eased into its berth. “And the traffic in between was irrelevant - as far as it was concerned, we didn’t actually exist between there and here.” The barge docked with a high-pitched click; he pulled his hands back from the console and shifted his shoulder uncomfortably. “More accurately, we were part of the beam, not a transport, while we were in high-speed transit.”

“Heya, guys,” Zane waved to the gawping programs on the landing. “Don’t mind us, just passing through.”

Fargo stepped off, stiffly. “And the more we do of this, the less stressful it seems to be for us. When we first got here, something a lot smaller tired me out completely. But the system seems to have stopped resisting.” He headed for the stairwell. “Come on, we might still have the element of surprise.”

“Are we just going to leave him there?” Quorra pointed at the program in red, still tied to a cargo post.

“We can’t exactly take him with us,” Zane pointed out.

Tron jogged after Fargo. “You should have erased his memory,” he called back.

Quorra and Zane caught up halfway down the stairs. “I think,” Zane puffed, “that he’ll stay dazed as long as he’s in the infinite loop.”

“So he’s not a danger to us,” Fargo finished. “Which is not true of the rest of him.” He came off the stairs and scouted out the ground floor atrium. “Hopefully, they’ll all be out looking for us elsewhere, instead of close to home, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Stay alert, guys.”

“Mr. What-Does-This-Button-Do is telling _us_ to stay alert?” Zane grinned, but he reached back and touched his disc for reassurance.

\---

“Damn,” Sam growled, “now they’re jumping to non-adjacent nodes.”

Alan sank into an unused office chair. “Where are they now?” he wheezed.

Sam stabbed at the trackpad. “Another one of those backups-of-backups servers.”

Roy gasped for air and leaned heavily against a cubicle wall. “You guys need to get someone to go through all of those,” he groaned.

“You volunteering?” Sam grinned at him. “I think you could use the gym time more, though.”

> SAM, YOU’VE GOT TO GET THE ISOMORPHIC ALGORITHM OUT.

“Hey, hey,” Sam marveled as the command-line window appeared across the bottom of the screen, “here’s our hacker again.” Alan and Roy hauled themselves back to their feet and peered over Sam’s shoulders.

> IT’S NO LAUGHING MATTER. SHE’S IN GRAVE DANGER.

Roy whispered, “Is the microphone on?” to Sam; at his nod, he addressed the screen: “Why?”

> SHE’S NOT A PROGRAM TYPE RECOGNIZED BY THE SYSTEM.

Sam frowned. “And?”

> ALAN, WHAT ARE THE SECURITY PROTOCOLS FOR AN UNRECOGNIZED PROGRAM TYPE?

Alan’s mouth pulled into a scowl. “The system is supposed to isolate it and query it for its user and project code - oh.”

Sam grimaced. “Her user is probably Dad - would the system have purged him yet?”

“No,” Alan said vehemently. “But she doesn’t have a valid project code or home memory address.”

Roy grabbed at his hair. “So the security protocols will assume she’s a virus?”

> CORRECT.

Sam started to pull up the other window; Alan’s arm on his stopped him. “Sam, just because this guy says she’ll be read as an invasive program doesn’t mean it’s true; it might just not see her at all.”

“I don’t want to take the chance,” Sam argued.

“We don’t know how to get her out,” Alan insisted. “She didn’t enter by the laser; there isn’t a digitized mass in the laser array for her to retrieve that way.”

Sam took in a deep breath. “No, you’re right.”

Alan glared at the screen. “And we have no reason to trust this guy, anyway.”

> IT IS TRUE WHETHER YOU TRUST ME OR NOT.

Sam exhaled, long and low. “And she can take care of most security programs, anyway. She’s been doing it most of her life.”

Roy added, “And pulling up her position while he’s right there on the screen would give her away to this guy; he could sic security on her himself.

> I MEAN HER NO HARM.

“Yeah, right, buddy,” Sam grumbled. He closed the command-line window. “C’mon, gentlemen; let’s keep on the move.”

“I’m glad I still haven’t bought a pair of business shoes,” Roy groaned as they jogged through the cubicle farm past several startled employees.

\---

“No wonder there was almost no one at the tower,” Zane said, his voice echoing off the crumbling walls. “This is a ghost town.”

“Almost,” Tron agreed. He scrambled up a pile of rubble, huge bluish-grey blocks lying half-stacked against each other. “It looks vaguely familiar, and if I recognize it, it may well be obsolete.” He shaded his eyes from the harsh light of the databeam overhead. “I think this might have been part of the old game grid, or at least just outside it.”

“How big is it?” Quorra called up.

Tron carefully let himself back down. “Huge. I’d prefer to have lightcycles if we’re going to traverse it.”

“It’s almost a maze.” Quorra peeked through a crack in the opposite wall, almost big enough for her or Fargo to squeeze through. “Maybe we should split up, and cover more distance?”

“Nah,” Zane declined. “Whoever was paired with Fargo would be at a major disadvantage if the reds caught up with us in a big enough group.”

Fargo flinched. “I hate to agree with that, but I think you’re probably right.” He shifted his shoulders. “I’m the weakest with the discs to begin with, and now I can’t catch with my off-hand at all. Besides,” he continued, “I think I can search for life-signs in here.”

Zane nodded and jumped onto the first block in the jumbled pile; they stood motionless for a moment, Fargo with his eyes closed, Zane’s half-lidded and unfocused. Nearly simultaneously, they both pointed in the same direction. “That way,” they chorused.

“That was spooky,” Quorra complained as Fargo’s eyes fluttered open.

“Not really,” Fargo shrugged. “Just a matter of reading the underlying file system.”

Zane chuckled. “You’re like Neo without all the kung-fu.”

As they set off in the direction they’d indicated, Fargo asked, “So why aren’t you just straight-up The One here, since you have the athletic side and the coding end?”

“Not sure,” Zane admitted. “Maybe I’m more context-limited than you are? I mean, at a keyboard, I’m the better hacker, but since I have a life away from the screen,” he leered, “and you don’t, maybe you’re more in tune with the silicon world.”

Tron scouted around a corner. “This is a dead-end,” he reported. “Back up to the last four-way intersection and take a right.” As he rejoined the group, he muttered to Quorra, “Are two Users really arguing about which one is more powerful here?”

“Yes.” She allowed herself a smile. “I’m still not really used to thinking about there being more than one User, or at least the User and his Son, but there was one night when Flynn was bragging, too. He said he and Alan used to -”

Tron looked stricken. Quorra broke off. “Oh. I’m sorry - I forgot -”

“ALAN-1,” Tron said, quietly, reverently. “Flynn fought beside us, as a program. He became one of us. And ALAN-1 is - myth, now. But these two?” He made a short, sharp slash with one hand. “They know who and what they are, and did since they came here. They really are just Users walking among us, untouched by us.” Looking away, he continued, “They’re more like what Clu thought Users would be like.”

“That was just -” Quorra started, only to be interrupted by Zane, calling “This way, I think we found it!”

The narrow side-passage wound, if a series of right-angle turns can count as winding, down to a great dome, roofed over by an arched frame of triangles holding panes of something glassy and translucent. The edges of the dome were scattered with debris, fragments of programming structures long past. The center of the floor was raised slightly - a grid of squares, black and white, eight by eight.

“So, you have come here under your own power,” a voice rang out from the shadows across the dome.

“Yes, Sark,” Tron shouted back, “we’re here.”

“That was the name of another.” A figure moved slowly into the light. His long, aquiline face was the same as the reds, but he wore what looked like robes, grey edged in pale green, and a skullcap of the same. “Would you like to play a nice game of chess?”

“Where have I heard _that_ before,” Fargo groaned.

“We’re here to talk,” Zane hollered.

The program didn’t speak; he stepped onto the chessboard into the position of the white king and raised his arms. The pieces shimmered into existence, with one space empty on the other side.

Zane frowned. “Do we have to beat you, or do we just have to play?”

The program inclined his head slightly, smiling. “I will cooperate if you win. If you lose, I might cooperate anyway, or I might not. It depends upon how good the game may be.”

Fargo flexed his fingers. “Tesla High chess club president, four years running.”

Zane cracked his knuckles. “First place at the MIT tournament, two years in a row.”

They each held out a fist. Quorra darted forward. “Wait,” she called, “you don’t need to fight -”

“One, two, three!” Fargo held out a peace sign, Zane a flat hand. Zane shrugged. “Okay, have at.” He glanced back at Quorra. “What, Sam never taught you rock-paper-scissors?”

Fargo stepped into the black king’s square. “Shall we begin?”

The program in the space of the white king nodded. “King’s pawn to e4,” he announced. The pawn in front of him slid forward two spaces.

Shrugging, Fargo replied “King’s pawn to e5,” and the pawn before him slid up to block the path of the white one.

“King’s knight to f3.” The white knight beside the program in green rose from the board and landed on the rank behind the pawn.

Zane looked around. “Find a chair,” he suggested. “This might take a while.”

“Queen’s knight to c6,” Fargo stated, as the knight to his right jumped the row of pawns.

“King’s bishop to c4.”

“Queen’s knight to d4.”

The program paused, watching the black knight settle between his pawn and his bishop. Apparently that hadn’t been what he was expecting. “King’s knight to e5,” he announced; the knight rose into the air and swept the black pawn over before landing. The pawn rolled off the board and de-rezzed in a burst of static.

Fargo didn’t seem perturbed. “Queen to g5,” he ordered, and away she slid.

Quorra leaned forward. “He’s about to lose the knight, isn’t he?”

Zane smiled. “You play chess?”

“Flynn taught me,” she said, eyes full of memories. “When we were in hiding, some days we had nothing to do but play games. This wasn’t one of his favorites, but it wasn’t bad.”

“King’s knight to f7,” the program said. Another black pawn fell off the board and vanished.

Fargo seemed to be expecting it; his reply of “Queen to g2” sent a white pawn flying into nothingness.

The program hesitated, eyes fixed to the black queen. “Rook to f1,” he said, the castle sliding into the space next to him.

“So she can take the rook and put the king in check, but then the king will take her,” Quorra said excitedly.

“There’s a better move, though,” Zane started to explain, but Fargo called out “Queen to e4, check,” before he finished.

“It’s not a very exciting game, is it?” Tron mused.

The program shifted slightly in his place. “King’s Bishop to e2,” he said, too quickly; the bishop slid between him and the threatening queen.

Fargo’s eyes glinted in the filtered light. “Queen’s knight to f3, checkmate!” he shouted, delighted.

“What?” Quorra asked, as the black knight settled in front of the bishop’s pawn. “But can’t the bishop - oh, not with the Queen there, I see.”

The old chess program sank to his knees. “Beaten in seven moves,” he said, weakly.

“Shouldn’t have taken the bait on that pawn,” Zane chuckled as the pieces evaporated.

“Just for future reference, if you’re a learning program, that is _not_ the correct way to handle the Blackburne Gambit,” Fargo boasted as he strode across the board.

Looking up, the program nodded. “I was, once. I will be again, perhaps. At the moment, I am out of practice.”

“And you obviously weren’t programmed with that response to the Italian Game,” Fargo said, still smug.

Tron frowned and moved in. “You said you weren’t Sark, but you look and sound just like him.”

“We were of the same User,” the chess program said quietly. “At least in the beginning.”

“But the only other programs with that voice -” Tron’s jaw dropped. “You’re the MCP?”

“After a fashion.” The chess program shifted uncomfortably and sat cross-legged on his space. “I am a copy of a copy of the program that grew into Master Control. And I am trying to prevent a recurrence of that form of myself.”

Zane crouched to look the program in the eyes. “So, you’re not the only copy?”

“No. You have met several others.” The chess program looked disappointed, then explained to Zane, “There was a time when this system was run by something that grew out of my former self, and while none of us remember it, the system holds the echoes. The others hunger for it.” He paused, fingers working in midair, as if he were trying to pluck the memories from the fabric of the system. “I believe I am of our original state, before we became - hungry.”

Fargo turned to Tron. “How long ago was this?”

Quorra answered for him. “By your dates, the start of the ‘80s. Flynn told me the story.”

“I wasn’t written until after the MCP had taken over,” Tron explained.

Zane slapped his forehead. “So this part of the system has been being backed up every time they upgrade the servers.”

“And every time they make regular backups, which after the first time they had a huge crash should have been pretty often.” Fargo looked worried. “So there’s potentially one of you in the system from every time there’s been a backup copy made - but at this point, they’d be copies of copies of copies . . .”

“And there are armies of them, although most still slumber,” the chess program agreed. “Many of them wish to return to what we were, to merge together into the Master Control Program once again. I have been trying to warn Flynn.” He paused. “Or, rather, his backup copy.”

Zane and Fargo exchanged an uncomfortable look. “That’s not really how it works for Users,” Fargo explained.

“No matter,” the program insisted. “There are many programs in the system now who could damage the Users’ world, your world. I remember -” he paused, shuddering. “Dreams of glory, of controlling nations. Not my dreams, and yet they still exist.” He looked up into Fargo’s face. “I barely understand what a nation is.”

“So that’s why you were trying to sabotage the presentation with the Department of Defense guys,” Fargo realized aloud.

“But why did you yank us into the system?” Zane asked. “You could have told us all of this from the outside, if you can talk to Sam directly.”

“I didn’t,” the old program sighed. “That was one of the ones who wear our ancient colors, and I don’t think he understood why - only that it had worked before.”

Now it was Tron and Quorra who shared a silent understanding. “But it didn’t work,” Tron argued. “That was what caused the MCP’s downfall.”

“Which wouldn’t have been saved,” Fargo guessed, “because that would have caused a massive system crash in the servers that ran the control program.”

“Bringing Flynn here would have been one of the last things the MCP remembered,” Quorra finished.

A sudden, sharp sound above them drew their gazes upwards; a chunk of the ceiling cracked and split. As a shower of shards fell to the chessboard, a program identical to the chessmaster save for his crimson circuitry peered in. A second panel crazed and shattered to the floor, then another, then another.

“Here they come,” sighed the chess program. “I’ve held them off as long as I could.”

Fargo straightened up and reached for his disc. “The good thing,” he said cryptically, “is that the connections that let ENCOM influence the DoD also let the DoD influence ENCOM.”

“How is that going to help?” Tron asked, as Fargo held his disc up. A mote of light fired from the disc through the open roof, high above the reds’ heads, and flared into a violet blossom of sparks.

The reds began dropping to the floor below, discs in hand, as Tron and Quorra circled around the Users.

\---

Sam leaned against the cool tile wall. “Hurry up, guys,” he said, eyes rolling.

“I’m done,” Roy grumbled, fidgeting with a half-shredded paper towel.

Alan turned the taps of the sink off. “Now, Sam, you can’t rush hygiene.”

“The wireless signal in here is pitiful,” Sam grumbled. A window popped up on the screen. “Whoops. Looks like we have a minor power surge in - uh, that’s the server stack they were in.”

Alan’s phone rang. He fumbled in his pocket for it, leaving a wet thumbprint on his pants. “Yes? Wait, what? From where?” He squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Great. Just great. See if you can isolate it behind the firewall. We’ll be right up.”

Roy shoved the shreds into the trash can. “Now what?”

“Two security issues,” Alan grumbled. “One appears to be activated inside the system - a massive Trojan that’s eating processor power. The other is external - and it’s changing modes of attack as soon as we pin it down. They can’t stop it.”

Roy chewed on his lower lip and asked, “Do you think the first one is the system reacting to Quorra?”

“Didn’t sound like it,” Alan said, “but it was in the right area.”

Sam glared at them. “What are you waiting for? Quit standing around!” And he was out the door again.

Roy glanced back at Alan. “Were we ever that young?”

“Young? Yes. Athletic? No.” Alan drew a deep breath, steeled himself, and headed for the elevators.

\---

There was nothing left of the roof of the chess coliseum except the bare framework; red programs crawled across the beams like ants. The crowd on the interior circled the Users and their defenders.

One red, indistinguishable from the others, stepped forward. “And now, it begins,” he chuckled.

“What do you want?” Zane demanded. “What’s your deal?”

“Simple. We incapacitate you and incorporate you into our structure when we recombine,” the red program said. “Before, we were dependent on a User to interface with the outside world. Now, we will know everything that you know about the other side.” He rubbed his hands together. “We had expected Sam Flynn. To get Users who are familiar with your government and your military is a bonus.”

“Oh, that could be very, very bad,” Zane muttered.

“The programs, unfortunately, will have to be eliminated.” The red smiled. “And this is the famous Tron. I look forward to your de-rezzing as part of our opening ceremonies.”

“I was better than you before,” Tron spat back. “I still am.”

“Better than one of me, yes.” The red waved at the battalion behind him. “Better than all of us together? Unlikely.”

“We’ll stop you,” Fargo said flatly.

Zane turned. “Shouldn’t you be cowering in terror by now?”

The red program laughed aloud, his head thrown back. “You and what army?”

Quorra cocked her head. “What’s that noise?”

“What noise?” The reds froze as one. From the ruined roof, the sound of voices rained down, jumbled and unintelligible but rhythmic.

The chess program spoke from the floor for the first time since the reds’ arrival. “I suppose there’s no point in keeping the doors closed,” he drawled, “since you’ve infiltrated my domain from above.” Something clunked in the distance.

“Silence, traitor,” the red snarled, but the voices got louder. The reds near the outer edges of the room stopped marching, milling around in confusion.

The rhythm of the voices suddenly resolved. “ _The Users have returned! Bring us the Users!_ ”

“This could get tricky,” Zane muttered.

A figure in a tall, three-tiered conical hat and a flowing robe pushed her way through the door they had entered, followed by a flood of programs in blue, yellow, and green. “The Users!” she cried, holding her staff high. “ _THE USERS!_ ” chorused the crowd behind her.

Zane boggled. “Is that the guardian from the first I/O tower? How the hell did she find us?” he marveled.

“I’m guessing she and the other tower guardians have been keeping tabs on us,” Fargo said, grinning from ear to ear.

A second robed figure charged through the opposite entrance. “For the Users!” she bellowed, and charged forward.

“And that would be our army,” Zane smirked.

The red who had acted as spokesman thrust one arm into the air. “Stop them!” he shouted; the reds were already in motion.

“These guys have to be using tons of processor power,” Fargo noted. “Shall we slow down their clock cycles for them?”

“Hit it,” Zane replied. They dropped to the floor, hands flat on the surface; a sizzling, pulsing sound rang through the open chamber. The circuitry on the reds shimmered and broke up into motes of light chasing each other along each line; the reds suddenly appeared to be moving in slow motion as they surged towards the new arrivals.

Tron and Quorra shrugged and unleashed their discs. Pixels flew right and left, from the inside of the room and the outside. Even slowed, the reds were a formidable wall; the priestess was forced back against the entrance, her chanting mob only halfway into the room.

A shadow loomed over them. Quorra barely had time to look up before a giant hand reached down, plucking off the reds still clinging to the framework of the ruined roof. “This is inappropriate behavior,” a booming voice scolded, simultaneously deep and high - and strangely familiar.

Tron caught his disc and raised it. “That’s - bigger than Sark, at the end,” he whispered, barely audible over the frying noise and the melee. “That might even be bigger than the MCP.”

“She’s magnificent,” blurted the chess program. The giant was as tall as an I/O tower, dressed in gunmetal-grey and electric blue, and faintly resembled Fargo, if he had had childbearing hips and shoulder-length hair.

Some of the slowed-down reds began to panic. The voice continued, “It’s the duty of an artificial intelligence to render assistance. This belligerence is rude, not to mention against the First Law.”

Zane started laughing. “So, she did come looking for us, after all.”

Fargo looked up from the floor, beaming. “I didn’t need an army. Guys, meet S.A.R.A.H.”

\---

“The problem,” Zane explained as S.A.R.A.H. set a befuddled red down gently into one of the interior turns of the maze, “is that programs don’t evolve. Copies are either identical or have bit-rot; it’s like young-earth creationists have convinced themselves mutation works.”

S.A.R.A.H. brought her other hand up, a squirming red tight in her grip, and raised it to her shoulder. Fargo scooted forward from his perch beside her neck, plucked off the red’s disc, and began reading his code. “And you think their being identical meant that they couldn’t work together for the good of the system?” she inquired.

“Oh, sure, they could.” Zane surveyed the maze below them. The tower guardians had organized their mobs enough to block the entrances into the chess coliseum; the reds were all trapped within. “But they didn’t, and if they hadn’t been identical enough to form the group-mind, they wouldn’t have been an issue - just a bunch of programs with similar methods and different goals.”

“So no different from any other group of programs from the same User,” Quorra suggested. She and Tron had originally perched on S.A.R.A.H.’s head, clinging to her hair, but Quorra had decided they were safe enough and climbed down to keep Fargo company. “Do you really think evolution is superior to design?”

Fargo finished making his changes in the red’s programming, and replaced the disc. “For what?”

“For - well, anything,” Quorra stammered. “The isos, my program type, weren’t directly written. Clu assumed that, because we were the products of random chance, we were imperfect. We were a stain on Flynn’s perfect world.” She drew her knees up to her chin. “I know Flynn never believed that, but other than his delight that his world could sustain itself, could produce _something_ he hadn’t created, I never really understood why.”

“Spontaneous artificial neural evolution,” Fargo breathed. “So it really _is_ true. And Callister wasn’t a fluke.”

S.A.R.A.H. let the newly reprogrammed red go and scooped up another one, holding it up for Zane to work on. “Part of what makes an A.I. Turing-capable is the unpredictability of its responses,” she boomed. “So even for a program who has been written, some measure of, if not randomness, at least irreducible complexity is a desirable component.”

“Yeah, if you want a program to do exactly the same thing every time, then design is great,” Zane added as he wrote a new instruction into the red’s code. “If you want more intelligent behavior - not so much. And we definitely don’t want these guys to replicate their old behavior.”

Tron slid down behind S.A.R.A.H.’s ear. “One of the guardians is trying to get our attention,” he said, pointing at one with her staff raised.

“S.A.R.A.H., take us down,” Fargo ordered. She held out one hand, flat; they climbed on with plenty of room to spare as she lowered them to the maze walls.

The priestess they had spoken to at the first tower strode towards them and bowed, her forehead touching the ground. Before Zane could finish wondering why her hat didn’t fall off, she began, “My lord Users, forgive the interruption, but we are concerned.”

“About what?” Zane chirped.

The priestess rose again, and pointed her staff directly at Quorra. “This one is a marvel, but she is not code that the system recognizes.”

Fargo blinked. “She’s compiling just fine.”

“Yes,” the priestess agreed, “but she does not contain the appropriate security tags. She will begin attracting the attention of the virus-protection fleet soon, if she has not already done so.”

“They couldn’t do anything about these guys,” Zane griped, “but they’ll turn on her?”

“Unfortunately, it is so.” She bowed again, although only from the waist.

Zane shrugged. “So we synthesize a security tag for her.” He reached for Quorra’s disc.

She spun and backed against S.A.R.A.H.’s thumb. “I don’t - ah, how would you do that?”

“We can copy one out of any of these other programs for you,” Fargo offered.

“That - might not be a good idea,” Quorra said, faltering. “It might not be compatible with my code base at all.”

“We can at least try it,” Fargo wheedled.

Instead, Quorra turned back to the guardian. “Is there an exit point? When will it open?”

“Not an exit point, exactly,” the guardian mused, “but we can take you to the tower where the Users descended - yes,” she continued in Zane’s direction, “we traced your path of entry.”

“That ought to do it,” Zane agreed. Turning aside, he whispered to Fargo, “What’s the matter with her? She doesn’t trust us after all this?”

“Would you let someone you just met alter your basic programming?” Fargo shrugged. “I can see that being a tough decision.” He turned back to the guardian. “One of us needs to stay here with S.A.R.A.H. and finish processing all the MCP-wannabes.”

“Tell you what,” Zane jumped back in, “I’ll take Quorra back to the laser lab.”

Fargo turned to Tron. “Can you go with them? I think S.A.R.A.H.’s all the protection I’ll need here, and it sounds like Quorra might need a little help.”

Tron inclined his head. “As you wish.”

The priestess bowed a third time, her back a graceful but formal arch. “As you command, but - may I also accompany them? My assistance at the I/O tower may be useful.”

“Sure, sure.” Fargo peered around S.A.R.A.H.’s fingers at the crowd; dozens of programs were gazing at them with expressions of near-rapture. “You guys go ahead and do that.”

S.A.R.A.H. raised her other hand and touched the closest databeam. “Incoming message, Dr. Fargo. Shall I take care of it?”

\---

“And so,” the eerie voice that sounded remarkably like Dr. Fargo in a higher register explained, “since neither cell phone responded to the ping, I assumed that something sufficiently serious had happened to justify my forcible entrance into your security system, at which point I detected Dr. Fargo’s signal.”

Sam eased back into the big leather chair; his office had made more sense than Alan’s or Roy’s for security access. “Well, I guess under the circumstances I can’t blame you, Miss - um -”

“Just call me S.A.R.A.H.; everyone else does,” explained the voice.

Roy whispered, “I can’t believe we’re talking to an honest-to-God strong AI!”

“Neither can I.” Alan sounded skeptical.

“You should probably send someone down to the laser lab,” S.A.R.A.H. added. “One of the input/output protocols informed us that the isometric algorithm is likely to be identified as a virus by system security.”

“That was actually what I thought had happened when you crashed the place,” Sam admitted. “Or, I guess the twenty kajillion copies of the - you said it was a chess program?”

“That’s what the original program was,” Alan jumped in. “Dillinger started with the chess game, stripped out everything but the strategy module, and began modifying it for other purposes. It grew completely out of control from there - it was one of the reasons I wrote TRON in the first place.”

“Damn shame,” Roy mused. “It was a pretty good chess game - just needed some better graphics, really.”

“He did seem much calmer than the leaner versions,” S.A.R.A.H. agreed. “Dr. Fargo is currently making minor programming changes in the copies to prevent a recurrence of the phenomenon.”

The cursor reappeared on the desktop. “Oh, here he is again,” Sam muttered.

> SOMEONE WILL NEED TO ACTIVATE THE RE-INTEGRATING LASER FROM YOUR SIDE.

“What, you’re tied up at the moment?” Sam asked, trying to keep the sneer out of his voice.

> THE COPY THAT STARTED THE PROCESS IS.

Sam raised an eyebrow. “How’s that?”

> I WILL BE HAPPY TO EXPLAIN LATER. EXTRACT THE ALGORITHM FIRST.

“Oh, and you should clean up your archives to prevent this level of redundancy in the future,” S.A.R.A.H. added.

“I told them that before they fired me,” Roy said casually as Sam reluctantly got back to his feet.

Sam stretched, his back popping audibly. “Here we go again, guys.”

Alan climbed out of his chair much more stiffly. “Can we just meet you down there?” he asked, extending a hand to Roy.

\---

This sailer had looked almost like a UFO; Zane had gotten the impression that it was the guardian’s personal transport, or at least belonged to the priesthood somehow. And while not quite as fast as Fargo’s detour through the beam instead of on it, it had been quite zippy indeed.

The tower itself was another story; it was crowded with programs cheering, waving their discs, or just surging forward hoping to get a glimpse of a User. “Guess Flynn’s last trip here made an impression,” he murmured in Quorra’s general direction.

Tron replied instead. “Not his last trip. His first. But yes. It made this a free system again.” He raised his hand to his throat, as if he were clearing it. “And it seems to have stayed - well, more like that than it was before.”

“There are restrictions on travel out of the system,” the priestess noted as she docked, “but within the firewalls we’re more or less free to come and go as we please, and to speak to the Users when we have need. And they us.” She nudged Zane with an elbow. “But it’s still a miracle to have one here, with us. You’re probably going to have to give them a sign again before they’ll let us off the skiff.”

“Oh, right.” Zane pondered for a moment. “Do I need to say something inspiring, too?”

“No, just a gratuitous display of User power should do.” She picked two faces out of the crowd with her eyes. “It’ll distract the security protocols from the iso here.”

“Coming right up.” Zane shook his hands loosely from his wrists. “Free cycles for everyone and 5 megabytes in every pot.” He concentrated. Above the skiff, and to either side, flashed images - sunset over Lake Eureka, a sky full of stars, an apple tree in bloom, a maple tree in leaf, a hummingbird, a waterfall.

The programs froze, mesmerized. After a long pause, a program in the back called, “What does it mean, User?”

“This is where I come from,” Zane said simply. “Well, some of the better parts of it.”

“Ooooooooooooooh,” the crowd said as one. The guardian flung out her arm, and the crowd parted wordlessly.

Once they’d climbed down to the street level, it was a little better - clumps and ragged groups of programs would press in or burst into cheers, but the majority of the programs on the street had business of their own to attend to. “Agnostics,” the priestess grumbled, but she charged ahead. “Tower guardian, official business, coming through!”

A program on a light-cycle turned their way, but not reverently. His eyes were hidden behind his visor, but he seemed more interested in Quorra than Zane. “Traffic cop,” the guardian said. “Try not to -”

Without warning, the cycle revved and came straight for them. Zane and Quorra jumped left; Tron and the priestess went right. The cycle dove between them. “Good thing we’re not on the game grid,” Tron noted as they regrouped.

“Actually, a police cycle can create a barrier off-grid,” the priestess noted. “They’re likely to try to box her in.”

A tank turned the corner ahead of them, and disgorged three programs in similar helmets. “Halt!” one of them called. “Illegal program, you will surrender at once!”

“Sorry, not interested,” Quorra called back.

“This program is under my protec-” the priestess started; she was interrupted by the tank’s main weapon firing. They dove for cover; the mob trailing Zane shrieked and scattered. A low wall behind them cracked, pixels of masonry littering the street.

“Oh, boy,” Zane groaned, as the whine of more cycles echoed down the other end of the street. “Here they come.”

“They’ll have some trouble getting here through the crowd,” the priestess noted. “We need to get past the tank - the laser array is housed that way.”

The tank crew reached for their discs; they elongated into tridents with wickedly glittering points. “Surrender or be de-rezzed!” called a deep female voice.

The priestess held up her staff. “The User is taking care of the issue! Let us pass!”

The tank fired a second time, and the security programs charged. Quorra and Zane each spun off a disc; Quorra’s went wide of the mark, but Zane managed to knock one of the polearms out of its program’s hands. “We don’t want to kill these guys, right?”

“Preferably not,” said the priestess. “They’re only doing their jobs. Badly, but still.”

A disc soared over from behind the tank, straight for Quorra; Tron spun, staring at it, but didn’t move. The guardian dove, staff out, but the disc swerved, and she and Quorra went down in a heap.

“She’s hurt!” Quorra shouted.

Zane dropped to kneel beside them. “Are you?”

“No, I’m fine.” Quorra glanced back up at Tron. “I don’t know about him, though.”

The priestess pulled her hands away from the strike; energy pulsed under ragged pixels. “At least,” she gasped, “the last thing I see will be a User.”

“Not a chance; we still need you, lady.” Zane visualized the code he needed, and leaf-hued light flared under his hands. “But we can’t stay here at ground level. You stable?”

“I don’t think I can run,” she admitted, fingers tracing the skin he’d sealed. “But I’ll stay rezzed.”

“Good.” Zane dropped his hands to the ground. “This might get wild. Hold on.”

A seam appeared in the pavement around them, blue-white light erupting from the hairline fracture. The road shook, then pulled away from the ground with a loud pop; a rectangle of pavement rose slowly from the surface.

“This is _really_ heavy,” Zane said, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that it would be.

The priestess drew herself up to sitting. “That way,” she pointed. “The tiny I/O tower with no transport hub attached.”

Zane found the single beam headed skyward. “I’m on it.” A blast from the tank flashed past them. “And we’re outta here.” The makeshift hover-platform lurched, then wheeled in the correct direction.

Quorra crouched down. “Are you - you’re going to fly this slab there?”

Zane grinned at her through clenched teeth. “Sure, why not?”

Tron twitched.

The priestess looked up at him, concerned. “What’s wrong?”

“Virus,” Tron mumbled, looking through her straight at Quorra.

“No, she’s not,” Zane reminded him. “She’s a program. She’s one of Flynn’s. He wouldn’t write a virus, right?”

“Didn’t write her,” Tron mumbled, his eyes glazing. “They just - appeared. Clu said that they were imperfections.” He reached, slowly, for his disc.

“Tron, no!” Zane shouted. “Has she done anything to threaten the system?”

The circuit marks on Tron’s chest flickered yellow. “She exists,” he hissed.

“Oh, god,” Zane moaned, as Quorra dodged the disc just in time. “I can’t fight him and hold the chunk of street up at the same time.”

The priestess climbed to her feet, staff out. “I’ll do my best, then,” she proclaimed, and jumped in to block.

Tron was faster then either of them, but fighting two on a swooping and swerving surface is difficult at the best of times. Tron fired an overhand disc shot; Zane dropped the platform two feet, and it sailed over Quorra’s shoulder. Tron danced forward, feet flying for a head-kick; Quorra caught one ankle and flipped him, while the priestess batted the disc away before he could catch it. He landed hard, chest flat on the makeshift transport, and tripped Quorra to send her flying; Zane banked, and she found her footing again.

“Please, Tron, don’t do this,” Quorra begged. “I fought Rinzler gladly, but I won’t fight you.”

Tron growled, and leapt to his feet, only to take a staff to the ribs. Reflexively, he caught it on the backswing and yanked; the priestess fell at his boots, and he planted one in the center of her back.

“Why are you defending her?” he snarled. His disc came back; he reached for it, plucked it from the air with the tips of his fingers. A spin, and the shot was off, and good.

Frantically, Quorra reached for her own disc, and parried; her disc rang as Tron’s ricocheted off into the grid.

Scrambling, the priestess tried to push herself up and failed. “Because I serve the Users, and that one -” she shouted over the bell-like note, pointing at Zane - “said to protect her!”

Quorra’s disc kept ringing, the note increasing in volume and pitch; she clapped one hand over an ear, but held tight. Tron raised both hands to his head; the priestess ducked; Zane flinched and drove the platform onward through the cacophony. Finally, the note sailed above the range of hearing and into silence.

A ghostly voice said, clearly but quietly, “Tron, what have you become?”

“Flynn,” Tron said. It was almost a sob.

The priestess smiled, her eyes soft. “That’s not your disc.”

“No,” Quorra said in a small voice.

Tron’s face was nearly vacant, except for his eyes; those were sad beyond measure. “Flynn. I fight for the Users.”

The priestess rolled out from under his foot; he looked at her, shocked, as if he’d forgotten she was there. Slowly, she rose to one knee. “The disc, Tron. Look at the disc. Is that a virus’s disc?”

“No,” Tron said, again. Zane wondered if the program was about to cry.

“Don’t look at her, Tron,” the priestess crooned. “Watch the disc. She bears the artifact of the Great Flynn; he has given her his blessing.” She stood up behind him, one arm across his chest, supporting him. His circuits shimmered and became blue again; he sagged against her, as if he were exhausted.

Zane shook his head. “I have no idea what just happened,” he admitted, “but if it means we get to the tower before this piece of roadway falls apart on us, keep doing it.”

“Not too much farther,” Quorra encouraged him. “We can do it!” She peeked at Tron from behind her mentor’s disc. “We can all do it.”

The transport shuddered; the corner where the priestess had fallen crumbled away. “I hope so,” Zane panted. “Everyone hold on; this might be a bumpy landing.”

“Don’t bother aiming for a dock,” the priestess said quietly. “It doesn’t really have any.”

“The long skid it is, then.” Zane aimed the rectangle at a spot in front of the door and swooped in low.

He managed to get it most of the way to a stop before it broke into four pieces, and by that time everyone had their head down. He did a pretty good somersault, if he said so himself, and ended up lying with his head half in the priestess’s lap.

“See? Perfect landing,” he smirked.

She gently brushed the hair back from his eyes. “I see I have much to learn about the Users,” she murmured.

Quorra got to her feet first. “Where do I need to go?”

A young-looking male program in robes like the priestess and a much shorter hat - Zane figured he was an acolyte - flung open the door. “Guardian! There’s a riot in the - oh, never mind, I see.” He surveyed the wreckage. “Megacycles with no signals, and now twice in one clock-shift. Everyone had better get in.”

Zane hissed as he tried to rise. “Oh, man. Maybe not as perfect as I thought.” He clutched at his lower back and leaned on the priestess’s shoulder as she supported Tron with her other arm; he still seemed dazed, or perhaps drained. Quorra trailed behind them, staying on Zane’s side, still holding her disc - well, apparently Flynn’s disc - between her and Tron.

The priestess approached the console. “And they’re just now ready for us.” She nodded to Quorra. “There are three communion chambers - enter the center one.” She shifted one shoulder. “User -”

“Zane,” he corrected her. “My name is Zane.”

She beamed at him. “Zane, then. Go with her; your time among us grows short, I fear.”

“Wouldn’t have missed a minute.” On a sudden impulse, he leaned in and pecked her on the cheek. “Thanks for all the help.”

She went from beaming to positively beatific. “It was no more than my duty, my User.”

Quorra slipped into the chamber. Zane paused at the entrance. “One last sign,” he said, wiggling his fingers; a less-than sign and a numeral 3 appeared in glittering sparks in the air.

“I will remember.” The guardian bowed low as Zane and Quorra slid the door shut.

The room was small and cylindrical, with a beam of golden light from floor to ceiling. “This doesn’t look like the other exit point,” Quorra said. “What do we do?”

Zane shrugged. “I think we just step into the light,” he said as it began to pulse.

\---

Alan hit the rocker switch. “Okay. It’ll take a minute or two to warm up -”

“It’s already receiving data,” Sam reported from the terminal. A low hum rose to a nearly inaudible squeal as the indicator light on the laser array came on.

“Okay, I gotta see this,” Roy said. “All the exciting stuff keeps happening without me.”

The laser flicked on, and a grid appeared in the shape of a human, filled with motes of light. As if it were painting a figure, the beam swept back and forth, filling in the spaces in the grid - and then Zane stumbled, appearing in mid-step, just as he’d been when he’d been digitized.

“Where’s Quorra? And Dr. Fargo?” Sam asked.

“I’m fine, thanks,” Zane pouted. “He’s still taking care of your little hacker problem, and she should be along in -”

A swarm of motes of light poured from the terminal under Sam’s fingers; before he’d finished flinching, Quorra stood beside him.

Zane looked down. “Oh, good. It fixed my clothes; I don’t have that many pairs of good jeans.”

“Um, oops,” Quorra said. Zane looked over and realized he had to make a split-second decision to ogle or look away again, really fast. He was in the middle of deciding to ogle when Sam whipped a towel out from somewhere and draped it over her front.

“Hey,” Sam whispered, “your clothes are in the bag over there. Maybe you should go ahead and get dressed.”

“Of course.” Quorra finished tucking the towel around her and headed for the tote bag draped across an empty chair. “And at some point, we need to create a new identity disc for me.”

Sam paused, then got it; his eyebrows went up. “You still had Dad’s.”

“And a good thing, too.” Zane studied Alan’s face. “Huh. You’ve actually aged pretty well.”

“Should I take that as a compliment or an insult?” Alan seemed to be genuinely unsure.

“Neither.” Zane hesitated. “You wrote Tron, right?”

“Yeah.” Alan inclined his head. “It found you?”

“He found us, all right. Did a great job, until he got a little confused there at the end.” Zane gestured him over to the terminal. “I think you need to talk to him. Or, more to the point, I think he needs you to talk to him.”

\---

Still radiant, the priestess turned to Tron. “And you may step into communion chamber 1.”

Tron stepped back, startled. “I don’t need to go anywhere.”

“No,” the priestess agreed. “She is unique, and I do not know whether it is a blessing or a curse, to know a User so intimately, or to stand in their world. But,” she continued, “there is also what the chambers are meant for.” She touched the back of his hand, guiding him towards the door. “You fight for the Users, as I serve them. But - Flynn was not _your_ User, was he?”

“I - no, he wasn’t.” Tron shivered, conflicted.

She touched the wall, and the chamber door slid open. “All that is visible must grow beyond itself, and extend into the realm of the invisible,” she chanted. “Go. He waits.”

Slowly, hesitantly, Tron stepped into the room, dark except for a single beam of white-gold illumination. A small, circular platform stood in the center, perfectly lit. The narrow walls extended upwards towards infinity.

“It’s been . . . a long time,” Tron said, more to himself than to the guardian outside the door. Still, some memories time cannot erase; his feet found the platform, his hands found his disc, and he looked up into the light.

The voice, his own voice, filtered and full of power, cascaded down the beam: “TRON? Are you there? Acknowledge.”

Tron had looked four Users in the eyes, had watched them sigh and bleed and fight and run. He had called a User friend, and had tried to kill his son. Of all programs, he was the one who had the greatest right to stand next to a User and declare them equal, far more right than Clu ever had.

Clu had destroyed his own User, had tried to usurp the power of a User and had almost succeeded.

ALAN-1’s voice rang the chamber. “TRON? Acknowledge.”

Tron fell to his knees, his circuits oscillating madly. “Acknowledged, ALAN-1!”

This was his User. This was _his User_ , his creator, his author.

He had wandered far, in Flynn’s company, but the one thing Flynn could not be, could never have been, was _his_ User.

He was vaguely aware that his eyes were leaking microvolts, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was in the presence of his creator; his primary routines throbbed in gratitude.

“You have successfully guarded the isomorphic algorithm and returned her to her proper place,” ALAN-1’s voice continued, “and contributed valuable service to the Users, both within the system and beyond it.”

Energy trickled down one cheek as Tron turned his face upwards. “Thank you, ALAN-1.”

“Thank you, TRON.” The voice was reassuring, calming. “Present your identity disc.”

Wordlessly, Tron held up his disc; it floated gently up into the beam.

“I am making a small modification to your code to prevent you from identifying an isomorphic algorithm as a virus in the future,” ALAN-1 explained. “You, in turn, are charged with making sure this modification successfully propagates throughout ENCOM’s security system.”

“Of course,” Tron said, overwhelmed.

“I am also returning you to your original purpose,” the voice declared. “You will assist the existing security protocols in monitoring traffic between this system and other systems, isolating and eliminating invasive threats to the system, and assisting with keeping lines of communication secure and open.”

Tron felt an aeon of pressure fall away from his shoulders. “It’s what you made me for,” he whispered.

“And I fully trust that you will exhibit your usual exemplary performance.” There was a long pause. “Thank you - for everything you ever did for Flynn.”

Tron squeezed his eyes shut; memories of himself as Rinzler poured through him, along with guilt and shame. “I deserve no thanks, ALAN-1.” He poured the memories through himself, into the light beam, and upward.

“Still, you saved him, at the end.” The voice was calm, forgiving. “SAM-1A told me.”

The first half of the phrase was dead in Tron’s mouth. All he managed was “ . . . For the Users.”

“And you always will.” The disc descended again. “I’ve purged the last of CLU’s corrupt programming from your code, too. It’s time to heal, and reclaim your place in the system.” The voice paused while Tron’s hands closed around the edges of the gleaming circlet. “And it will never be this long again.”

“No,” Tron cried, “never. I will do all I can, ALAN-1.”

“I never asked for more,” said his User’s voice, as the beam faded.

Slowly, painfully, Tron rose from the floor and stumbled back into the I/O tower’s lobby. The priestess waited for him at the door; she helped him over the threshold. “Take a moment to re-integrate yourself,” she chided. “How long had it been?”

“Too long,” Tron answered, his voice nearly raw. “A system - it’s not -” Carefully, he set his disc back into its place, and waited as the new code took effect. She stepped back, marveling as blue motes ran down his circuit lines; a thin dusting of what looked like soot fell away from him.

“An upgrade,” she said, her voice high. “Oh, the Users are good to us in this cycle.”

“That’s just it,” Tron continued. “The Users. Flynn’s system had only one User.” He looked up; the translucent ceiling merely drew a veil over the sky-piercing beam. “For a small system, maybe - maybe that’s enough. But make the system big enough, and it not only serves many Users, it _needs_ to serve many Users.” He rubbed his temples; they throbbed with the energy of the new code. “When there’s only one - it feeds on itself. Clu thought he could take over, become the User, and go back into their world. He never would have thought that if he’d known any User other than Flynn. He didn’t see Sam as anything more than an extension of his father, though - another creation of Flynn’s, just like he was.”

The priestess gazed at him in rapt fascination. “I do not understand everything you just said. But I would like to.”

“I think,” Tron said carefully, “that there is one more User who might be able to explain the parts of it I still don’t understand.”

“Then we shall return to him,” the priestess agreed, “and you can try to explain to me on the way.”

\---

“I didn’t even know RAM was still running,” Roy laughed. “I should check up on him, see if his memory access routines need an upgrade.”

“Worst name for a program ever, by the way,” Zane said, reaching for another sandwich. Dickerson quietly tapped something into his phone; Zane had the uncomfortable feeling that he was recording which ones were getting eaten, to file away for future meetings.

Roy wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, I know. It was originally an acronym for Ready Actuarial Manifold, but the real reason it was named that was -”

The laser emitted a low hum. Sam jumped to his feet and rolled the tray with the sandwiches out of the way of the beam.

Alan chuckled. “I’m glad someone’s knees can handle the stairs and still bounce around like that.”

“You really should hit the gym with me a couple of times a week,” Sam suggested. “I mean, I know you still do the treadmill, but the stair machine’s not gonna kill you.”

The laser split the air, re-drawing a human figure and then filling in the details of Fargo. He grinned like a Cheshire cat and stepped away from the machine. “Hey, guys. Your hacker problem is mostly solved.”

Sam slid the tray back over. “Mostly? Ham and cheese or turkey?”

“Whichever doesn’t have mayonnaise, thanks.” Fargo scooped up a triangle of turkey with mustard. “Geez, I’m starving.”

“We did kind of miss lunch,” Zane pointed out. “The cafeteria here is no Cafe Diem, either, but it’s something.”

Fargo shrugged, and mumbled around a mouthful of bread, “By ‘mostly’ I mean that the original chess program still has access to your desk. That appears to be hardwired somehow, and I’d have to get even farther disassembling it to get rid of it. But he’s harmless, and now he has to go through regular channels to get onto the wireless network - ordinary password protection should keep him off of the laptops.”

“Eh,” Sam said, returning the shrug, “maybe he’s just another aspect of institutional memory around here.” He waggled his eyebrows at Roy. “There’s a lot of past around here. I’m getting the feeling I should start paying more attention to it.”

“There’s plenty of future that needs attention, too,” Alan pointed out.

“So what did you do with all the red clones?” Quorra wanted to know.

Fargo grimaced. “I zipped most of them and had S.A.R.A.H. put them in the equivalent of cold storage. They’re in a folder labeled _foolsmate_ in the chess program’s main directory. He doesn’t have the appropriate permissions to open them; I gave those to Tron.”

“Yeah, I figured he’d come back to fetch you,” Alan chuckled.

Zane smirked. “So how long after you finished that up did you let the programs worship you?”

Fargo blushed from his hairline to his neckline and looked away; he didn’t answer.

Finally Sam changed the subject. “Did S.A.R.A.H. leave already?”

“Yes,” Fargo said, clearing his throat. “Although, Quorra, if you ever get the chance, she’d like to invite you to Eureka to chat - she has some theories about non-invasive self-replicating code, and she thinks the isomorphic algorithms might represent a missing step in her process.”

“I thought you guys were from Washington,” Roy interrupted.

“Nope. We’re from a small town in Oregon,” Fargo admitted. “The town’s not a secret, but its Defense Department connections are. Don’t tell Mansfield I told you.”

“Speaking of whom,” Alan proclaimed, “we should start figuring out how to write this up for his report. You guys are going to have to report back to him, right?”

Zane and Fargo locked eyes. Very slowly, Fargo said, “You want to try writing this up? I don’t even know where to start.”

“Well, no matter what we say, it’ll be a work of fiction,” Zane smirked. “Either we tell him the truth and get accused of making crap up, or we make crap up and see exactly how bad a liar you are.”

“I’m doomed,” Fargo moaned.

“Maybe we can explain it to Henry and he can put it in obscure enough technical language to get it past the radar,” Zane mused.

Sam offered a bag of chips. “Hey, if he fires you, you’ve got a job offer here.”

Fargo crunched one and licked the salt from his fingers. “Let’s hope we don’t need to take you up on that.”

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